| One to eighty seven | Passioni e hobby |
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In making a scale model of 1:87 (with the proviso that any effort is, however, respectable) I personally have been conditioned by those ancient memories which have been so indelibly impressed on my mind. In the years between the 1950's and 1960's, me and my friends passed lots of our free time at the freight yard of the local station. On a lever-powered bogie in the space between an old wooden buffer and the first freight wagon on the line, we would enjoy ourselves going backward and forward for hours. Our game would be interrupted only to admire an 835 which, huffing and puffing and with much manoeuvring, assembled and disassembled the trains and carriages. In the same way we would halt the proceedings to gaze enraptured at a 100 doored towed by an 880 incoming from Florence or observe the noisy parting of a goods train towed by a powerful 740 as it began its journey on the winding steel road towards the Garfagnana area. There were not so many trains, but those that there were all followed the same single rule: that is, that of the point to point connection. The train that went towards east sooner or later would have returned from that same cardinal point. The construction then would have to be in keeping with my memories. Dimensions permitting, I might have opted for an oval so flattened that the two parallel opposing lines would have been an integral part of the main station so that the natural route satisfied the primal exigency: a train leaving the station must eventually return from the direction in which it left. |
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Rule number two, taking into consideration my love for manoeuvres being greater than that for simple journeying, is that the shunting yard be certainly as least as big as the staion itself. And the third and last principle in the realisation of such a model concerns the radius of the visible curves. One thing is certain however; operating on a scale of 1:87, getting the trains to change direction without the passengers suffering irreversible injuries, is not the easiest of options. If for the actual physical curves this is objectively a tough nut to crack, for the points some things can be done, and of this we will speak later. It is clear that whatever rule, principle or proposition is adopted it can all be summed up in a single aim: the maximum realism possible. As far as regards the positioning of the model I arrived at the conclusion that a good result must be easily accessible, clearly visible and enjoyable to others. Therefore: if sufficient space was available why not create a model as part of a living area? All these thoughts came rushing to the fore when within a couple of years one of the other my two daughters got married and as a consequence, we had a spare room in the house. In the following pages, in over 200 photographs in chronological order the work undertaken has been described and illustrated.
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Passions are not easily classified. There are no intelligent or stupid passions, nor interesting or banal ones, rational or illogical interests. Collecting stamps, going fishing, observing the stars, breeding canaries or giving up one's free time for the construction of a train model are nothing other than the differing chapters of the same book. Even if the objective is the same for all, in truth it is the personal convictions together with the techniques used, the amount of free time available and, unfortunately, the quantity of money available which makes a formal and substantial difference to the end result.