It was through a chance introduction to Kier Hardy - who built the EM gauge/ blue diesel masterclasses ‘Wibdenshaw’ and ‘Hornsey Broadway’ - that I became reinvolved with model-making after a 14-year break. Relocating for a new job had brought me south to Gloucester. Finding a place to live and a new circle of friends had caused my previous layout and stock to be boxed-up and stored. It was Kier who reintroduced me to the exhibition circuit in 2002, and since that time, a steady stream of new rolling stock projects, inspired by the many photographs available in books or posted online, has seen my wagon and locomotive fleet more than double in size.
Initially, these ran on my smaller previous layout ‘Canada Road’ which dated from post-Polytechnic unemployment in the Northern England of Mrs Thatcher’s early 1980s. The Canada of the name stemmed from teenage dreams of emigration to a more hopeful place!
After the move south, a busy family life prevented any schemes for a larger, better, replacement until 2012 and a predatory take-over of the aerospace company where I was working at the time. My
