Don’t tell me model railways aren’t art. My little engine is a thing of spirit and beauty

It’s a summer day at Llangenydd station, and the afternoon train is already late, not that anyone seems to mind. A smartly dressed man has leaned his bicycle against the station’s water tower, and his terrier jumps up as he unwraps his sandwich. A commercial traveller, perhaps, or a professor from Liverpool University on a cycling tour of Snowdonia. Even though we’ve never been here before, we can guess where we are. The colour of the stone, the yellow gorse on the embankments, and the distant glimpse of the sea all tell us that we’re in the top left-hand corner of Wales. The weatherbeaten condition of the steam locomotive that wheezes into view suggests that we’re in the early 1960s: just a few years before Dr Beeching will sweep this whole scene into history.

Except, mercifully, he won’t, because Llangenydd never existed outside of a space six feet long and two feet wide.