Backscene
Chris Leigh offers some thoughts on adding variety to his modelling in the style of some venerable past modellers…
It’s a ‘spanner’ in UK English and a ‘wrench’ in American English. I remember well the minor fracas when we sold Harrier jump jets to the USAF and when they read the manuals they didn’t understand what a spanner was. George Bernard Shaw once said that Britain and the USA are two nations divided by a common language, but it isn’t just the use of language that differs.
I got into modelling North American ‘HO’ in the 1970s when I wanted to build a ‘wild west’ layout around the lovely Pocher ‘American’ 4‐4‐0. I still have the locomotive and, 50 years on,it still works, but I never built the layout. One thing that many American modellers have done over the years is to model freelance railroads. Perhaps it was because the wide open spaces of the USA took too much space to model that American modellers often went for something more compact, and invented their own railroad names to cover the fact that it wasn’t representative of the Union Pacific or whatever.