A Hornby treasure trove

This is a lovely website i came across today, the Hornby Railways Collector Guide features all Hornby and Triang rolling stock from the year dot. There are some fascinating models in here, i never knew Hornby did a Class 77 model but indeed they did! It was discontinued in the year i was born which probably explains why i've never seen it before.

The Class 81 model looks very interesting too (see right). It also was discontinued in 1971 (obviously a bad year for electric modellers).

One electric loco i did know about (and once owned) was Hornby's Class 86 model. I remember the fiasco the first time my excited teenage self got the new loco running, i forgot the pantograph was raised and took out my layout's bridge!

Legacy audit

Many years ago i had a series of OO gauge layouts but in my early 20s i put everything away in boxes ready for when i had my own house so could start again. "Starting again" took me nearly 13 years and in the end i have gone for a Continental HOe gauge layout anyway! My legacy OO stock, track and what-not has been stored away in the loft all of these years. They are thus in reasonable condition though haven't run for probably around 20 years! I am conducting an audit of what i have got, to see what can be reused (to be honest not a great deal though i found a box full of OO/HO scale people!) Its nice to compare the OO gauge to HOe in any case. I may try and sell some of this old stuff...

More old photos

The drawback about the pre-digital camera and cameraphone past is that often many things were not recorded and so now you have to rely on fading memories. Of course being able to record everything now is not always a good thing! Here are a few more photos of my old OO gauge layouts anyway. The first two are of the final phase in the garage when the board had been extended and i had my first go at end-to-end layouts.

The strange shape of the photo is because half the photo is black due to a fault with the camera flash, not because of any censoring! Here we can see two of my old locos a class 47 and a class 86 in the shed.

Looking in the other direction we see the goods shed and a class 08 in War Department colours!

Photos of my later layouts in my bedroom are even rarer (and no photos exist of my brief N gauge experiment). Here we can see my class 25, 73 and an American loco. I still have all of this stuff though whether they all work after being in boxes for nearly 20 years is another question.

The old railway in the garage

My first model railway was a great train set bought for me one Christmas as a boy. It was a Hornby Royal Mail set with working mail despatch system and a Class 37 hauled train of coaches. This formed the basis of my first permanent railway set in my parents' garage. You can see a couple of photographs below. It was not up to much and the garage was not a good site for the layout being rather draughty and slowly rotting away. I did keep a layout here into my teens. I must see if i can find a few more photos.

Project Eskalon, what is it?

This is a blog about my return to railway modelling and is called Project Eskalon. But what is it? Well Eskalon is the project name for my new layout. Why Eskalon? No idea, the name just popped into my head and it stuck. When my new layout is built Eskalon will be the name of the station, now the layout will be based in Austria and Eskalon doesn't sound terribly Germanic but its a better name than trying to make up a name. It will be my layout anyway and i can call it whatever i like!

As the project is now moving forward i have created a dedicated blog for it, some earlier posts on my personal blog have been moved here to provide some background. So then what exactly is the project...

For years i had model railways (usually OO scale but with one N scale attempt) but in my early 20s i stopped due to space reasons mostly but i kept all of my stock, track and buildings in boxes ready for a relaunch one day. When i had my own house i finally though i had the space for a new layout but it still took me 10 years to get around to it! The catalyst for returning to railway modelling is probably my return to Airfix models a couple of years ago, this got me back into the world of glue and tiny paintbrushes. In fact some of my models i made last year make up a small train (in OO scale).

I have decided upon a HOe scale layout based on the Austrian Zillertalbahn. Phase 1 of Project Eskalon will be to buy a train, a loop of track and a power controller so i can get used to operation again and also test out some layout ideas. This hopefully can begin next month. Following on from this will be phase 2 which will be a proper layout on a dedicated board and a more interesting layout.

This blog also will include my Airfix modelling where the subject is railway focussed such as the train i built last year.

Return to rail?

One of my major hobbies when i was a child was my model railway. I had one from about the age of 5 or 6 when i was bought a trainset for the first time (Hornby Royal Mail set with a BR blue class 37 locomotive). Until my late teens i continued with the hobby with layouts first in my parent's garage and later in my bedroom. You can see a photo of the early garage layout here.

I stuck with OO gauge most of the time though did experiment with N gauge at one stage. I lost interest in my late teens and needed the space for other things anyway. My rolling stock, buildings and track were packed away in boxes... and remain there to this day! When i got my own house i did start thinking of restarting the hobby though never quite got around to it. Well now i am thinking about it again!

While my later layouts focussed on contemporary British Rail i am now thinking of going back in time and travelling the popular track of an interwar GWR branch line. I might even do a small layout based on the line down to Stratford. I got an excellent book on this line a few weeks ago and its given me a bit of inspiration to consider recreating Wilmcote station circa 1934 for example.

In the meantime the Perry Barr turntable is still in existance, hidden away behind a fence. This is one of the last remnants of a live steam layout that once ran on the sports field next to where i worked. I've never actually seen the trains running on there but they did up until the mid-2000s i think. The track indeed was only lifted in around 2006 or 2007. I don't have any photos of the track in existence but these photos from 2008 clearly show the trackbed (this photo i took in 2004 for a Quicktime VR does show the track - just about). You can compare the turntable with the photo below (one of the two turntables was destroyed of the layout was destroyed).