On looking into Old Railway Modellers

[locomad]

We always have loads of RM's (and many other mags and books) for sale at the Wakefield Show in November.  There were a good quantity of 50's ones there last year which I avidly devoured whilst manning the stand. Prices are very competitive and lots of visitors come prepared with lists of their missing issues.  Plenty of time is spent before hand time sorting them into dates and types of magazine to assist people seeking specific ones.

 

Come along this year and have a root through for the 'one that got away!'

At a local railway interest group we always have monthly a collection of Railway magazines where members and public have donated magazines and proceeds go to club, prices are often as low as 10p per issue, it's often magazines less than 12 months old, make an offercand get whole year for £1, local church hall model railway shows are another good source.

 

Problem often for the committee or members in charge is that loads are left unsold then they become a problem, it's sometime assumed wrongly that anything over few years old it's not worth trying to sell them, my view pre 1970 tend to attract more interest.

 

It would be interesting to find what circulation where over the years I read in editorial that for 1960 it was 45,000 which was a lot then, it was about 130,000 in early 2001, i suspect it's gone down a bit

[The Johnster]

Do you mean an African or a European swallow?

 

Someone had to say it...

 

No, nobody had to say it...

[Eclipse247]

I too was something of a fan of Ray Pope's books. I thoroughly enjoyed the stories and was also, even at a fairly young age, impressed that the model railway equipment described was recognisable as, for example, the r-t-r of the era. For example the West Country "Barnstaple" was frequently mentioned which, I assume was the Dublo or Wrenn model. Hornby's factory at Margate was also mentioned and, as I recall, met with Telford's approval as a staunch Southern man .

Hi Pat,

I'm glad you liked them. My father was quite hot on detail and accuracy. They also had depth in terms of social and political issues. I would be interested in your interpretation of them. Maybe see my blog here. Mark Pope

[rjh]

Hello

 

I just came across a site with download files of the following issues of Railway Modeller...

 

https://archive.org/details/railwaymodeller

 

Issues are ( . Railway of the month .. Plan of the month ... notable article and/or prototype station plan )

1963

Jan ( . Ambition in TT-3 by H. Myott .. A modular layout [Minories add-ons] ... Burmham on sea drawings )

Jun ( . Peter Denny rebuilds Buckingham Great Central ..A garage scheme ... Special https://archive.org/details/railwaymodeller Country survey, your last chance)

Aug ( . Borchester by J F Webster, based om RM pl an ..A thoroughgoing terminus ...psp:Blencow ...Madder Valley at Pendon )

1964

Jan ( . Broadland Railway by Bury St Edmunds MRC .. Extendibility. by C J Peacock ... psp: Daventry ...)

Feb ( . Wannetka Warlock & Western by Peter Haddock ..Terminal topics .. motorised Airfix Crane by J. Dugdale )

Mar ( . Glenfern Rly by Geoff Cowmeadow ..Small and Simple .. psp Aylesbury High St )

Apr ( . To be done........."etc )

May

Aug

1965

Apr

Aug

 

 

Regards, Rodney Hills

[rjh]

Hello

 

[typos fixed]

 

I just came across a site with download files of the following issues of Railway Modeller...

 

https://archive.org/details/railwaymodeller

 

Issues are ( . Railway of the month .. Plan of the month ... notable article and/or prototype station plan )

All layout plans are by Cyril J Freezer, unless stated otherwise

1963

Jan ( . Ambition in TT-3 by H. Myott .. A modular layout [Minories add-ons] ... Burmham on sea drawings )

Jun ( . Peter Denny rebuilds Buckingham Great Central ..A garage scheme ... Special West Country survey, your last chance)

Aug ( . Borchester by J F Webster, based om RM pl an ..A thoroughgoing terminus ...psp:Blencow ...Madder Valley at Pendon )

1964

Jan ( . Broadland Railway by Bury St Edmunds MRC .. Extendibility. by C J Peacock ... psp: Daventry ...)

Feb ( . Wannetka Warlock & Western by Peter Haddock ..Terminal topics .. motorised Airfix Crane by J. Dugdale )

Mar ( . Glenfern Rly by Geoff Cowmeadow ..Small and Simple .. psp Aylesbury High St )

Apr ( . To be done........."etc )

May

Aug

1965

Apr

Aug

Regards, Rodney Hills

[PatB]

Hi Pat,

I'm glad you liked them. My father was quite hot on detail and accuracy. They also had depth in terms of social and political issues. I would be interested in your interpretation of them. Maybe see my blog here. Mark Pope

 

Sorry for the really long delay in replying. I somehow managed to miss your post while the thread was current. I'll be checking out your other web presences shortly. However, as it's probably 40 years since I read any of the books I'm not sure if I've really got anything of value to contribute. I suspect that much of the social and political context completely passed me by. Well, what could be more interesting or important than model trains ?

[33C]

Sorry the photo's have been a long time coming but i had to get her out of storage and buy a decent camera. She still runs well and is completely as she was when i first saw and read about it all those years ago!

Edited May 25, 2022 by 33C
added photo.

[33C]

On 18/06/2016 at 00:04, 33C said:

A great inspiration to me, if it doesn't exist, make it yourself! The LNWR Rail-motor still exists! I have it in my collection after finding it on a well known auction site and had to buy it. It runs very well and the natural ageing suits it to a T.

Here she is!

 

 

Edited May 25, 2022 by 33C
added photo.

[kevinlms]

On 07/05/2017 at 19:10, rjh said:

Hello,

 

Interesting thread....

 

Ah, but who was "Dax"?

==================

 

I've asked Steve Flint at Peco/RM and nobody there now apparently knows...

 

Apart from the Living Lineside series, you find other little sketches in the same style as headers etc to other items over the same period.

 

the Rolla Controla

==============

 

I have one of these...

 

search RMweb on: Rolla Controla

 

you should get about seven hits with more gen.

 

I am hoping to get to ExpoEM at Bracknell on Sunday 14 May 2017 and I am quite willing to bring the Rolla Controlla along and hook it up to the test track by arrangement.

 

Let me know if you are interested in seeing / using the controller...

 

"The R-C is to today's electronic pulse width modulation (PWM) controllers as the Baird television is to today's home entertainment systems".

 

Regards,

Rodney Hills

archivist@merg.org.uk

Yes, 'Dax' appeared as the artist for the 'Readers' Letters' page, where there are 2 railway staff, running with a barrow, intent on handing the GPO sack to the loco driver, as it speeds through the station.

[BernardTPM]

Yes, before 'The Little People' (Bissell, Bullhead and Bellcrank).

[Andy Kirkham]

Does anyone remember a layout from about 1970 called something like London, Bristol and South Wales? It must have been truly enormous as it featured several major and minor Great Western stations; I seem to remember photographs of High Wycombe (with its high brick retaining wall behind) and Pilning.

[St Enodoc]

6 hours ago, Andy Kirkham said:

Does anyone remember a layout from about 1970 called something like London, Bristol and South Wales? It must have been truly enormous as it featured several major and minor Great Western stations; I seem to remember photographs of High Wycombe (with its high brick retaining wall behind) and Pilning.

ROTM July 1969 I think. Paddington to Cardiff and back via a reversing loop with a short cut through High Wycombe (cutting but no station). A proper "system" layout.

[kevinlms]

8 hours ago, BernardTPM said:

Yes, before 'The Little People' (Bissell, Bullhead and Bellcrank).

Wasn't one of them unnamed for a long time? I seem to remember that there was a mini competition to suggest a name.

[Joseph_Pestell]

11 hours ago, Andy Kirkham said:

Does anyone remember a layout from about 1970 called something like London, Bristol and South Wales? It must have been truly enormous as it featured several major and minor Great Western stations; I seem to remember photographs of High Wycombe (with its high brick retaining wall behind) and Pilning.

Appeared in another thread here only a couple of weeks ago with layout plan.

[Andy Kirkham]

4 minutes ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

Appeared in another thread here only a couple of weeks ago with layout plan.

Perhaps someone could point me to it.

[Joseph_Pestell]

3 minutes ago, Andy Kirkham said:

Perhaps someone could point me to it.

It is two posts later that Nick Gough has posted the plan.

[BernardTPM]

4 hours ago, kevinlms said:

Wasn't one of them unnamed for a long time? I seem to remember that there was a mini competition to suggest a name.

Yes to both, Bellcrank & a competition.

[tomparryharry]

I still read old copies of RM from time.  The editorial style has a certain type of humour.  Being a PECO publication, you would see PECO wherever the name PECO was in use. The typesetter in those days must have had several spare sets of the letters C,  E, O & P,  (all in bold capitals), because PECO characters would have worn out......

 

Fair play to PECO. I guess the staff at PECO are still at work  making PPE for the country at large. I'm not in any way connected to PECO, just an interested observer.

 

In the interests of equality, tell them you saw this PECO post in RMWeb.

[Pacific231G]

I've not yet come across PECO but have found PECO in editions around the 1970s. Earlier on it was just Peco.

I didn't know that Peco were producing PPE, good for them, but they may well be back to their day job by now. 

 

Probably OT but It would be interesting to know what Railway Modeller's typesetters used in the magazine's earlier days . This is probably well known to most  of us but typesetting and compositing for letterpress (where inked metal type is literally pressed onto the paper)wouldn't have been done in house. RM only mention the printer who presumably did the whole job of typesetting, compositing and printing. Both Monotype and Linotype machines cast the type in hot metal from matrices (moulds effectively) so no danger of running out! 

Monotype, traditionally used for books, cast individual letters while linotype, mostly used for newspapers, produced an entire line of text. Linotype was quicker but Monotype enabled finer adjustment of kerning (the space between characters) and correction of typos so I'm guessing that was what magazines used.

Layout for photo offset litho- which really came in during the 1960s- is normally done by an in-house designer as you just have to produce a page that the printer can photograph to make the plates (all done digitally nowadays of course) The actual printing process relies on the repulsion of water by grease. 

 

I was involved with magazines at school and university so in the mid sixties to early seventies and I only ever worked with offset litho literally gluing the typed copy to layout sheets with cowgum and making up headlines  with Letraset (ughh!)  I did though make some programmes about printing, publishing and the desktop publiishing revolution in 1989. We did find some examples of letterpress including a weekly Welsh language newpaper in Dolgellau that was still using a couple of Linotype machines, wonderful clattering beasts, but that was by then very exceptional except for very high quality work such as wedding invitations and FTSE 500 company reports. 

[St Enodoc]

1 hour ago, tomparryharry said:

PECO are still at work  making PPE

Presumably PPECO?

[RichardT]

4 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

making up headlines  with Letraset

If you look at many of the headlines in the late 1960s to 1970s RMs it’s very obvious that they were done in ever-so-slightly wobbly Letraset.

 

I have gradually put together a bound set of RMs from vol 1 to 1989, and often dip into them both for reference and just to read for enjoyment.  The editorial style & many of the articles treat the reader as a grown up, the magazines are enjoyably text heavy, and they always remind me of meeting Cyril Freezer several times in the 70s when I was a junior member of Mike Cook’s South Devon Railway/York Show team. Considering it was intended as a “mass market” magazine it (and the 1970s “Model Railways”) are much closer in style to “Model Railway Journal”, but without the current MRJ’s self-conscious archaism. (I’m a big fan of MRJ though but, having come across it at issue 4 and quickly made sure I had a full set.)

Edited October 14, 2020 by RichardT

[Pacific231G]

I couldn't agree more Richard though my collection is only complete from vol 1 (Ian Allen) to 1964 plus a few later bound volumes.

Unfortunately, though I too met him several times, I only had one really substantial conversation with Cyril Freezer. That was over lunch at one of the Chatham dockyard shows in the large (and leaky!) shed  and, surprise surprise we mainly talked about his final ideas for Minories (kick back goods yard with headshunt parallel to platform three road and a third short siding for guards' vans)  but also about how well or otherwise he got to know his contributors.

 

What I find about RM, when compared with the other contemporary magazines, was its greater emphasis on layout building- modelling of the complete railway- rather than focussing on modelling railway vehicles. One could be cynical about that, given that Sydney Pritchard's main products were track and wagon wheels both of which a layout builder would need, but I think that change of approach was evident from the very start and certainly from the start of CJF's editorship,  when it was still published by Ian Allen. Railway Modeller just seemed to have more and more interesting layouts than MRC or MRN. It was also wisely assiduous about not pushing Peco, PECO or PECO products (as evidenced y umpteen articles about hand laying track)  

[33C]

double post.

Edited May 25, 2022 by 33C
double post

[kevinlms]

9 hours ago, 33C said:

double post.

It is??????????????