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. Of the 90 model railways at the 2019 Warley National Model Railway Exhibition — the combined Crufts and Royal Academy summer show of the model railway calendar — it’s not the most spectacular, though it might be the most typical. Railway modelling is an international hobby, with its own national styles and idioms. In UK homes, a small country station is often all that will fit in a spare room or garage. With imagination and craftsmanship, though, you can use that space to evoke a world. Llangenydd is an exquisitely observed and rendered variation on a very British theme: your own private Adlestrop.

There’s any number of these variations at the Warley show. Some are scale replicas of actual locations. Sydney Gardens focuses on the main line that slices through suburban Bath, complete with distant glimpses of Georgian terraces. Others capture an atmosphere without tying themselves to specifics. Diesels in 1970s BR blue throb beneath floodlights at an urban depot: little more than a diorama, really, but it catches the mood, and gives its creator a stage on which his trains — the real stars of the show — can perform.