Tank Engine Tuesday? No that’s not engines for tanks. I once saw a Matilda tank engine for sale on EBay and thought for a moment, it’s a start. A Matilda Tank on the Front Lawn would certainly be a conversation piece …
Anyway a DMZ demilitarised look at my occasional Sidetracked blog, where my gaming life sometimes overlaps with railways and model railways.
Ben, this lovely beast of a Tank Engine is still lurking in the family toy cupboards, along with this vintage handmade station with its tin and card adverts
“Bill and Ben are based on the Bagnall 0-4-0STs “Alfred” and “Judy” of Par [Docks] in Cornwall, who are both preserved and in working order at the excellent Bodmin and Wenford Railway in Cornwall.”
“According to the foreword of Thomas and the Twins,Alfred and Judy are both Bill and Ben’s twins. Alfred was once repainted yellow for a Days Out with Thomas event, to resemble Bill.”
One of the attractive sections of H.G. Wells’ Floor Games (1911) is the ‘lectric, or clockwork engines, the photographs of the cities and islands by his wife Amy Catherine (“Jane”) Wells and the charming drawings by illustrator J.R. (John Ramage) Sinclair.
Floor Games 1911
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The most attractive parts of railway modelling has always been the scenics and especially the figures, often a useful (but sometimes expensiv e source) of civilians for my DMZ Demilitarised Games – snowballers, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts / Guides …
Much as I like British railways and vanished quirky branch lines, I also like American railroads, Mixed Train Daily and Short Lines (Hello citizens of Bowdon!)
The Bowden Railroad Co – its sole rolling stock 1940s /50s
1953 Mixed Train Daily – one of my favourite railway books
One of the things I like about the Internet age is how you can drop in on small communities for a short while.
I often do this whilst browsing the Forgotten Georgia blogpost and its Facebook page.
Reading Mixed Train Daily, I come across little historical nuggets of rural and wild-west America or Americana that have survived into the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The Bowdon Railroad of west Georgia is one such curiousity. Bowdon Railroad used to link up with one of the Georgia main lines at Bowdon Junction, providing the rail link to the City of Bowdon (“The Friendly City”) located in Carroll County, Georgia.
Bowdon now has a population of about 2,000, twice what it had in the railroad days of the 1940s and 50s This is more like the population numbers of a small town or larger village in the United Kingdom and quite different from the average city in the United Kingdom with its requirement to have a Cathedral, despite the occasional granting of recent smaller Millennium UK cities.
I like this evocative Short Lines Map of Georgia from Mixed Train Daily
The Bowdon empire
Through the wonders of the Interweb you can drop in on Bowdon as a community today through its website – see http://www.bowdon.net
You can see on the photo gallery who has received Business of the Month this time.
You can even see the Founder’s Day Parade video on YouTube, as if you’re standing by the side of the road and wandering around. https://youtu.be/IB1W2_LY7Tg
Blog posted by Mark Man of TIN on 20 October 2020.