In Praise of Railway Modellers

In Praise of Railway Modellers

This weekend I went to the annual model railway exhibition in Wilton.

It’s easy to dismiss railway modellers as anoraks. True, many of them are pedants, but many are genuine scholars.  (The fanaticism displayed in the opening page of Mr Blackwood‘s Fabularium is really not exaggerated.) Many modellers insert an imaginary railway between two actual lines or stations. In some cases, they exhume plans for branch lines that were submitted but never actually built.

What they do is not so very different from historical novelists, in that they borrow a context which somehow authenticates the imaginative addition contained within it. I had originally intended to define Mr Blackwood Fabularium’s context more sharply by borrowing all the characters’ names from Kelly’s Directory for Canterbury for 1851 and to time the stories according to Bradshaw, the Victorian railway timetable. Neither proved possible. There is no Kelly’s Directory for Canterbury in 1851, and in the earliest such directory I could find (from 1859) all the characters were called Smith or Jones, which, with respect to any Smiths and Joneses reading this post, are not striking enough for fiction. As for timing the stories according to Bradshaw, I couldn’t manage it. Few of the stations were more than ten or, at most, fifteen minutes apart. (Victorian trains were quicker than you think.) To make the timings believable I had to introduce lots of signal stops.