My name is Richard, and I am an armchair modeller. For about thirty years, I have read lots of books and magazines, had lots of ideas, bought lots of models, and made negligible progress towards actually building a model railway. Occasionally, I have been that insufferable soul at an exhibition who passes judgment (not usually out loud, I hasten to add) on others’ modelling efforts without ever coming close to doing it myself. Now, unequivocally into my late thirties and with a pandemic putting other hobbies on hold, the time may have arrived at last to do something about it.

My two main obstacles have, I think, been a surfeit of ideas (thanks to having read so much and done so little) and a lack of confidence (i.e., fear of not being able to get it right first time). These two problems have tended to feed into one another, causing an oscillation between reducing ambition to ensure that what I attempt is achievable, and increasing complexity to ensure that the end result will be satisfying. To put this into context, my theoretical target for at least a few years now has been to build a small N gauge branch terminus (BR Western Region, late 1950s), but a desire for a fairly varied operating pattern, coupled with the sheer number of different track layouts (let alone scenic settings) from which I can choose, has collided head on with the Fear to result in a total lack of progress.

However, over the past few weeks it has occurred to me that the bizarre circumstances in which we currently find ourselves may have presented me with an opportunity. Were I to build a model railway now, my choice of what to build would be limited, essentially, to what I can do with what I already possess. As if by magic, the “too much choice” problem disappears: there are only so many ways one can turn a small box of track and a couple of pieces of sheet material (with the possible addition of a tiny baseboard built years ago for a shunting plank) into an operable, fairly interesting model railway. It is, I suppose, the modelling equivalent of looking at the contents of one’s fridge, freezer, and cupboards, and working out what can be combined to make a meal.

Hopefully, this rambling preamble is the beginning of an account of the building of my first actual working model railway. Crossrail was first mooted around the time I began to become properly interested in railway modelling; this may be tempting fate, but perhaps I will get something running first.