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'Humour' on layouts - good or bad?


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Much as I love Carry On and seaside postcard humour, I've always liked the gentle humour of the names of the places and stations in Trollope's Barchester Chronicles - Winter Overcotes is spot on for a GWR station, with Winter Underclose just down the line and not forgetting Shearing Junction for the line to Worsted.

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On the Hazel Grove club layout Smethurst Junction that I help to build/maintain/operate there are several local companies that bear the name of several club members and either current or former jobs in or outside of the club.. all in good humour.. plus now we have our very own newspaper offices making fake news just to keep things topical.

 

I used to run a train of Daleks in OBAs with a suitable 'Exterminate!' alert from a sound gizmo that I got in an easter egg once... the audience enjoyed it so long as it wasn't done too often mind you.

 

Cheers Paul

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Yes.

ISTR it was by Arthur and Chris Towers from Bradford MRC.

 

 

Cheers,

Mick

Dave and Shirley did a model of this name many moons ago. It was exhibited at York Sow.

Baz

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Many many moons ago I was watching the Manchester Model Railway Society's "Gransmoor Town" 2mm finescale layout at a show. 

 

​Completely dead-pan, a train of private owner wagons passed through, behind a lovely Midland loco.

 

"Pugh. Pugh. Barney. McGrew. Cuthbert. Dibble. Grub."

 

Now that's worthy...

 

From vague memory, at some point has a model shop somewhere done these as a commission, as I've definitely seen a similar set on a layout from one of the local clubs in Leics?

 

In a similar vein, Copenhagen Fields features the characters from 'The Ladykillers' getting out of a taxi on the forecourt of the NLR station building, and a set of PO wagons liveried with the names of the actors in the adjacent coal yard.

 

http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/uploads/monthly_11_2013/post-8055-0-47010100-1384886852.jpg

 

 

There's also a 7mm German layout around with businesses in a row of shops along the backscene named for the German characters in 'Allo 'Allo - "Flick & von Smallhausen, Privatdetektive" etc...

 

I have to admit, I quite enjoy that kind of thing on a layout, so long as it's not too 'in your face' or overdone

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I'm surprised no one has mentioned gnomes. Or was I imagining them.....

 

 

:laugh_mini2:  :smile_mini2:

 

 

Jason

 

 

 

David Lowry and his gnomes on the 4mm models of London and North Western Branches?

 

I have not heard if they are adorning his 7mm models.

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I presume you mean this ironically (not about the humour, about there not being any).

 

Humour is subjective though.

 

Plenty of people think Charlie Chaplin is funny. I think root canal surgery is preferable.

 

Likewise, Eric and Ernie, Mrs Browns Boys, Last Of The Summer Wine (after 1980ish), French And Saunders, Victoria Wood, Absolutely Fabulous, Outnumbered, Are You Being Served?, Bread, Butterflies, etc. Yet these shows had tens of millions of people watching them.

 

 

However I quite like Dad's Army. It's nice gentle humour about something that could have gone spectacularly wrong. It has a sense of schadenfreude about it.

 

 

 

Jason

Edited by Steamport Southport
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Dave and Shirley did a model of this name many moons ago. It was exhibited at York Sow.

Baz

 

And featured in Railway Modeller - 1972?

Also shown at one of the Model Railway Club exhibitions at the Central Hall, Westminster IIRC.

 

An early "compact" layout (was it in a fish tank or something similar?), a simple oval of track, but it was the detail in the buildings - as well as the characters - that were the fascination.

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Could be if they were under armed escort, though. (See post #112)

 

There's a famous WW2 photo of just such a situation taken at Paddington IIRC, about 1940. The looks on bystander's faces - well, you can imagine!

 

I can't bring to mind when and where, but I'm sure I've seen a WW2-period layout in 7mm which features a little scene of a downed German pilot standing in the station yard-  under guard by Capt. Mainwaring and the Warmington-on-Sea platoon.

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