ALL ABOARD - WU WU!!!
Who’s excited?
what to do?
We’re really into using our past to inspoire all our futures so to help celebrate 200 Years of the railways should we:
Try to inspire children to make, invent and become engineers?
Create cardboard locos with children?
Get our trains out for children to play with?
Put a model railway in the back of #Starship22?
Morph #Starship22 into the 'Last Train to Grand Central’?
Try to get folk to give their old model railways to schools?
How about all of the above!
Oh go on then. But only if you’ll be part of it?
We’ll do the rest. We just want you to help co-create the world’s biggest model railway by bringing some life, adding stories, colour, models to a length of railway track that we’ll send you in a box file.
We’ll plug them all together and show them at a big event in September and maybe even tour the UK with them.
Sign up here now to be part of it and we’ll get back to you
See the film
The film below tells you all you need to know about the project.
THE WORLD’S SMALLEST
Let’s start at the very beginning, the very best place to start.
On Easter Sunday, in World Creativity Week, Nick popped down to Lands End and announced our #Railway25 year with the World’s Smallest Model Railway Exhibition on a table top featuring:
Penydarren - A model of the world’s first steam railway loco built by Cornwall’s Richard Trevithick, apparently in Shropshire for use in a South Wales coal mine.
Beauty - Nick’s pride and joy, a real steam loco he used to run in his garden at home
Duck - a push along wooden loco that is rite of passage for most children
Hornby No 6 - a 1950’s clockwork loco that is made from tin plate, most likely mined in Cornwall
D2 - a real steam engine powered by a candle and a small reservoir of water that shows how it all works
Intelino - a robot train that can be coded on tablets or by reading colour tiles in the track
GWR Goods - an N gauge loco and trucks that children can drive themselves
Nick’s going to be taking the exhibition to 23 festivals this summer including Pigstock, Shindig, Brockwell Bounce , The Great Estate, Glastonbury, Camp Bestival, Lakefest and Gone WIld as well as fetes and other approrpriately random pop-ups.
The world’s biggest
A week later, on Trevithick Day whan a parade of mighty steam traction engines take to the roads in Camborne town centre and model railways run in community halls, we launched the World’s Biggest Model Railway.
Nick added a box to the font of the loop of n-guage track and put a call out for schools, communities, clubs, businesses and families to all make a model railway in a box file.
BBC CORNWALL CHAT
It’s always nice to pop into a BBC Local Radio station when we’re in town and Nick had a lovely chat about the with Julie Skentelberry at BBC Radio Cornwall that you can listen to here.
BE PART OF IT
We also launched the project in Redruth in Cornwall, just down the road from Camborne.
That’s where a man called William Murdoch, a steam mine pump engineer invented the first steam power locomotive, the ‘Murdoch Flyer’ in 1785 that ran on the road (and scared the local vicar into thinking he’d seen the devil!)
He had his ear clipped by his boss and was told to get back to his job so he left the loco.
One can only assume this inspired Trevithick who created the Puffing Devil road loco in 1801 and then the Penydarren railway loco in 1805 which underpinned the industrial revolutoon yet he still ended his life penniless!
Saturday June 7th was Murdoch Day and Redruth Town Council kindly offered us a pitch at this fantastic family day out.
We want you to be part of it
If you do too sign up here now and we’ll get back to you
We’re requesting donations to help cover the cost of this and hope you can help but don’t worry if you can’t.
Whatever do have a look below for some ideas and inspiration.
OUR INSPIRATION
Our inspiration for this project came from Kavin Staden of Moor Boxes, who we met at the Great Cornwall Model Show last year and who makes complete model railways in box files as you can see in the film below
WHAT TO DO?
Once you have emailed us as above we’ll get back to you and send you a box with the track fitted in it for you to create your model around.
We don’t mind how complex or simple it is - we do hope some top end modellers will join in as well as children and look forward to seeing a variety of models.
What’s important to us is that they tell as story - maybe about you or your community, your local station or a journey you have been on so include photos and writing on the inside of the lid.
Our demonstration model is called ‘Surf Side’, a fictitious place in Cornwall with a surf board shaped station and canopy, the Eden Project and Tin Mine pump houses in the background.
It would also be great if you could make a short film and upload it to YouTube and link to it using QR code on the lid. We can tell you how to do this.
START HERE
In this day and age it’s rare to find many manufacturing companies still in the UK but Peco Model Trains do exactly that, they make train parts - track, rolling stock and buildings at a factory in the small fishing village of Beer on the South Devon Coast.
As you can see above Nick visited them last year for a factory tour and they offered to provide the components needed to finish the layout he started as a boy - of Bloxham station in the Cotswolds - in the back of #Starship22
Get building
Watch the flm above to see how easy it is to assemble the Peco building kits on Peco’s YouTube channel.
Go shopping
A great place to start railway modelling is a railway modelling shop and there’s a great place in Camborne called Kernow Model Train Centre who have a great selection of trains, rollings tock as well as scenery product and Peco buildings.
If you can’t get to the shop they have a great website here
CANCEL NETFLIX
We’ve been working towards this for a few years, so here’s the back story.
#STEAMpowered24
Our launch event at The Geat Western Railway museum STEAM in Siwndon back in 2024.
Hopetown
Our pop-up at the opening of this £25m centre to celebrate 200 years of the railways
Cornish Creativity
Nick had a great chat with BBC Cornwall when he visited The Great Cornwall Model Show and a school for World Creativity Week 2024,
#Bloxham24
The model railway we’re buidling in the back of #Starship22