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Description: The latest news from the heritage and arts sector from Acme Museum Services
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What is it with model trains? I can go anywhere in the world and people of all ages and all cultures will stop and wonder at model trains whizzing by in a shop or a display in a heritage centre. I recently watched a big bloke in his model layout, at the Colne Valley Railway, slowly cleaning a long railway track with a tiny brush. The crowds of people pressing their noses on the glass were fascinated with the scene of this gentle giant engineer.
Perhaps it’s the steaming success of Thomas the Tank engine and chums with toddlers that makes children grow up to admire trains. For adults it can evolve into nostalgia and escapism from the manic Mondays of 21st century life. When I worked in a Toy Museum, the collectors I met reminisced: as children they could not afford to buy a Hornby or a Bassett-Lowke engine. When they became successful adults they hunted in auctions and jumble sales for these bits of tinplate.
There are many famous male celeb train collectors and landscape builders such as Rod Stewart, Neil Young and Jools Holland. According to another celeb maker Pete Waterman “Some of the best modellers in the UK, if not in Europe, are women now, and there are LGBT and transgender modellers (including Eddie Izzard)” he says. “You’d never have got that 25 years ago.” (Quote from the Guardian 23 March 2022 article by Dave Simpson). Perhaps the use of model trains and model landscapes is something to think about
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