You may knock trains, but I went to the Pendon Museum in Oxfordshire at the weekend, and it gave me a new appreciation of train modellers.
www.pendonmuseum.com
In the 1930s an Australian called Roye England emigrated to Britain and settled in the Vale of the White Horse - a beautiful stretch of countryside that runs roughly between Oxford and Swindon. He was dismayed that the centuries-old cottages were being demolished and rebuilt with concrete and iron houses, and, appreciating he couldn't save them, decided to record them as models.
Some of the stuff in this small museum is incredible. It's all in 1/76 scale I think, and dates from the 1930s to the present day. Scratch-built locos. An entire church in 1/76 with lighting, stained glass, communion set, hymn books.
One of the exhibits is the earliest known serious attempt to place a model railway in a landscape, the Madder Valley set from the mid-1930s. Another has a massive trestle bridge. The Vale scene covers several square miles of imagineered landscape from the 1930s.
Most of the buildings are made with card, then painted with watercolours. Even the bricks are painted to match the real building they are based on - including the bond patterns. Absolutely incredible stuff.
So don't diss the railway guys. You could say that we follow where they have led. The shop also had some great white metal figures for rural scenes that no manufacturer of ours would produce. Shepherd in a smock with border collie? Don't see that on Tamiya's catalogue
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