◆GAUGE ‘OO’ ◆MODEL Rapido Trains UK 909001 Metropolitan ‘E’ Class No. 1 ◆PRICE £179.95 (DCC-ready) £279.95 (DCC sound) ◆AVAILABILITY Rapido Trains UK stockists Web www.rapido.co.uk
For anyone born and brought up in outer suburban London there can be few more attractive subjects than the Metropolitan Railway. The term Metro-Land, revived and popularised by poet laureate Sir John Betjeman, referred to an area of Middlesex, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire served by the Metropolitan Railway and given over to residential developments by an associate organisation of the railway. The result was a stylised ‘quality of life’ for those whose jobs in London allowed them to live out of town in and around the Chiltern Hills out to Harrow in Middlesex and Verney Junction, Buckinghamshire, (over 50 miles from Baker Street) and commute into the city by train. The term ‘Metro-land’ was coined by the Met’s marketing department in 1915 when the Guide to the Extension Line became the Metro-land guide. It promoted the idyll of a modern home in beautiful countryside with a fast railway service to central London. The Met was absorbed into the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933.