Unwittingly celebrated World Heritage Day last Saturday with a trip to the Swansea Model Rail Exhibition, from which I've been sorting & editing footage and uploading with the ultimate view of creating a YouTube compilation, so time now to feature the first model railway to have all footage taken now uploaded.
Box Station is an N scale model railway built by the Swansea Railway Modellers' Group, the original subject matter being a station on the Great Western Mainline between Bath and Chippenham. The nameplate of the signal box is now preserved at the National Rail Museum. Some of these videos I have slowed down from the original running speed as seen on the model last weekend so as to give a more realistic appearance.
It was also here that the Rev. W Awdry, author of the Thomas the Tank Engine books came to watch the trains passing through, as he lived nearby, and he himself relates how the stories were inspired by hearing the freight trains passing by night, banked by tank engines who would push from behind on trains too heavy to be hauled up the gradient by the main locomotive detailed for the run, and imagining the different puffing patterns of the different sized locomotives as being them talking to each other.
