Tuesday, July 12, 2011
The wrong model railway
A couple of weekends ago we happened to pass a brown sign on a motorway exit saying 'to the model village'. As it happened we had an hour or so in hand and BH wanted to visit the place from which FIL had fond memories of visits, many years before. So we followed the brown signs, which did not let us down for once, and found ourself outside the entrance to Bekonscot (http://www.bekonscot.co.uk/). There was even somewhere to park. On entry, we claimed to the man at the window that this was our first visit for 50 years and we were not impressed that he seemed so little impressed. I didn't see how he could have known that we were overdoing it a bit; it was only BH, not the pair of us.
The model village and its model railway occupied maybe an acre. Houses, railways, ponds and plants packed tight and immaculate over the whole. In the bright morning sunlight the whole was most attractive; a bit silly, but fun. There were pubs, hotels and restaurants. Care homes and hospitals. Cement factories and coal mines. And lots of railways. I was very impressed that they had brought in a chunk of real signal box with real (Westinghouse) signalling & control equipment and had wired some of the railways up to it. In a concession to the modern era, the rest of them were controlled by a computer.
One nice touch was a model of Enid Blyton's house which had been presented a few years previously by the then mayor of Beaconsfield. Another was that the place, despite being a fairly serious attraction, was run by volunteers as a charity.
An anachronism was the model of a fox being hunted across some fields. Drag hunting not yet having reached Bekonscot.
And the fish had a scaly problem. The coy carp might have been splendid but they were on the scale of whales rather than fish, relative to the human inhabitants.
Very pleased with ourselves we reported back to FIL at the end of the day, only to find that it was the wrong model village. His model village was at a place called Bourton-on-the-Water (http://www.theoldnewinn.co.uk/), was entirely different and certainly of greater grandeur and antiquity. Enquiries with Mr. Google suggest that the two places were built at roughly the same time, in the thirties of the last century, at a time when such model villages were a lot more common that they are now. There is also one at the Isle of Wight so we will clearly have to go there when the summer hols. come around.
# posted by Jim @ 7:17 AM 
