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Railway modelling standards have come a long way. CHRIS LEIGH suggests it’s more by accident than design.
My
son and daughter-in-law both work in education.Listening to a conversation between them is like listening to a foreign language, as sentences are peppered with acronyms and initials, SATs and SLTs, Key Stages and so on. Railway modelling can be a bit like that. I hear modellers talk of ‘nem couplings’, meaning NEM pockets, and there’s all that jargon around scales and gauges that must be confusing to newcomers.
My former club, down at Egham, has a Tri-ang-based ‘TT’ layout. I’ve never worked in ‘TT’ and I have no idea whether Hornby’s new ‘TT:120’ models will run on the old track or not. There’s just too much to learn and in the end we ‘old ’uns’, with limited storage capacity left in our memory banks, must decide what we need to learn and understand, and what we can allow to pass us by.