After more than a decade of nowhere to build my little empire, I finally took delivery of my garden workshop on November the 5th. It’s insulated, heated and has (after a lengthy wait) electricity.
It’s also damp, with an inexplicable amount of water penetrating the floor.
Now I know we’ve just had the wettest December on record, but really – this isn’t on. I requested a remedial visit on Christmas Eve, and apparently the ‘construction’ industry takes a two week break over the Christmas period. I’m still waiting for someone to come and fix this.
It really is rather disappointing.
And as for the twenty-one year wait? Well, I originally became interested in model railways in the middle 1970s. I had a small N gauge layout in my bedroom that grew from a Minitrix set into a pretty dysfunctional collection of out of scale Lima stock, a mixture of Peco track and set track and so on.
I did love that original Minitrix set – a green class 27 (from the solebars up, at least) and two maroon Mk2a carriages. I got it for Christmas, 1975 and I can clearly recall pushing the train up and down a yard length of Peco flex track on the bed in the spare room of 44 Folly Lane… I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a model train as much since…
The whole thing futtered out in the early 80s when I left home. I had an abortive revival in the late 80s, but even though the OO stock looked better, it still didn’t run any better and that fizzled out in the early 90s.
During this period I didn’t really have much more than a passing interest in the prototype scene, which is a shame as if I’d known how much duller things would become I would have paid more attention to the dying days of Speedlink, Enterprise, and the whole-scale demise of locomotive haulage.
The one exception to this widespread ennui, was a two week trip to China in November 1992 to see the last of the mainline steam. To say I was captivated would be an understatement. On my return, I devoured every single tiny shred of information about this magnificent spectacle. There wasn’t much, this was the early days of the internet and to my credit, I set up and ran for a number of years a website that compiled as much information as possible to share with like minded folk.
That’s me, in very fetching cold weather gear, at the Changchun depot with QJ6886. I really liked the QJs without the shields in front of the feedwater heater pump.
What I really wanted, of course, were models of the wonderful machines I’d seen. There were none, and it seemed ridiculous to suppose there ever would be, because despite feverish recording of the spectacle of steam as it died out, there was no market for models of this niche interest. My interest evolved into American modelling, and the late 90s and onwards were devoted to collecting and trying to build a US outline pike. I covered that in some detail right back at the beginning of this blog.
And then, astonishingly, Bachmann China – having been closely involved in exponentially improving plastic scale models for the American and UK markets suddenly brought out a small range including the three final steam classes to run in China,QJ, JS and SY. Of course I had to have them! Unfortunately, they were pricey, I was broke and they were produced in very small batches that disappeared almost overnight. Over the next decade, I picked up an SY in Hong Kong, a JS from Ebay and finally in November 2013, twenty-one years after my first, last and only experience of a proper, working steam railway, I got a tip on a pair of QJs going for less than half price each.
Of course I had to have them, they are wonderful. And I still have nowhere to run them. One step forwards, two steps backwards…
