Not so modern image

[Reorte]

Capitalisation can be misleading. Modern Image is the mid 1960's. modern image is recent.

 

The use of the phrase is oft-discussed.

http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/78719-modern-image-is-the-phrase-outdated/?hl=%22modern+image%22

 

It's one of the terms that I'd like to see in Room 101!

I was certainly mislead by the term and pledge to not use it again. It's not as if there isn't a period that could better be described with another term. I can see that, some time ago, the steam - diesel divide seemed like a big, huge one but as someone else has pointed out there have arguably been much bigger changes in the railway since then, way beyond just the means of traction so lumping them all together is really meaningless, and my misunderstanding that it just meant "now" (for whenever "now" is) was wrong too.

[kevinlms]

Not sure how old you are, but making an assumption;  I would guess that the end of steam seems closer to you now than 1923 did to you in 1968 because you can remember the end of steam, but never experienced the grouping.

1968 was 8 years before I was born, and in some ways it feels to me just as much a nebulous historical date as 1923. In theory privatisation should be my big railway history defining moment, but I'd just stopped catching the train to school, got a car, gone to college and missed it!

As a product of 1956, I've always been far more interested in the grouping period (late 1930s LMSR), than BR steam, which really doesn't do much for me at all. It seems to me to be a rather disjointed period, with a mixture of adhoc improvements (BR MK1 stock & improvements to existing locomotives - mostly ex-LMS) & some total disasters (Modernisation Plan - with some very poor choices of diesels & misguided traffic 'improvements', notably hump yards, many of which were white elephants, from day one).

 

My 2nd period of interest is the Blue Diesel Era of the mid 70s to Sectorisation, when the worst of the diesel fleet had already been withdrawn, but the much traditional traffic still existed, but rapidly disappeared throughout that period. Interestingly, this period was mostly AFTER, I'd left the UK in 1972 & I had little practical experience of this period, largely based on books & videos.

 

Rather strange that the periods, that I'm interested in, I didn't experience either! Most odd.

[Poggy1165]

 

 

Rather strange that the periods, that I'm interested in, I didn't experience either! Most odd.

 

Not at all. This modelling what we remember thing is something peculiar to railway modellers. Ship modellers frequently model sailing ships, or ships from WW1 and WW2. Few people now recall even WW2, let alone the others. Military modellers do not all focus on the present. Apart from the World Wars, Napoleonics are favoured, but there is also interest in the medieval, Romans, and Ancients. 

 

I woke up one day and realised with a shock that you can no more go back to yesterday than to pre-group. Indeed, even if you are modelling the 1990s, you are a historical modeller, whether you realise it or not. This thought process is what led me to model pre-group.

 

Of course, for some people nostalgia is the thing. They want to model the scene they remember as boys/young men, and that's fair enough. My youth was (as far as I was concerned) a time of destruction, of line closures and the long, lingering death of steam. That period does nothing for me. Others' mileage obviously varies, as it is currently the most popular era of all.

[Reorte]

My youth was (as far as I was concerned) a time of destruction, of line closures and the long, lingering death of steam. That period does nothing for me. Others' mileage obviously varies, as it is currently the most popular era of all.

I've a theory about the popularity of that time, from the point of view of someone too young to remember it. It sounds like it was probably quite depressing at the time but just looking back the depressing future has already happened and, having not experienced it, what it was becoming doesn't really figure when thinking of the time, just what it actually was. It must be very different for people who were there.

 

There's also a lot more easily available material than for earlier times (and probably more than for the immediate following years too for that matter).