One of the joys of looking at model railways for me (a non-railway modeller from a railway modelling family) are the landscaping, buildings, figures and scenics.
This includes the Peco backdrops of city, town, seaside, mountain and country.
The urban ones have little joke puns about the shop names or owners, much as model villages often do.
One example below is Tim Burr and son – carpenters or wood shop. Others may be people the Peco artist knew (the same thing was done in the original Airfix railway building range).
Can you spot any other pun names? The pub. The mineral water factory. The chippy.
These painted backscenes were done by Peco employee and artist Jack Whealdon in the 1960s and 1970s. He must be one of the most familiar, affordable and frequently purchased landscape painters in the world!
I use these country and city scenes as backdrops for displaying my figures, once painted …
My Salvation Army Life Saving Scouts and Guards (Guides)
… and as the backdrop to my tabletop games.
I like imagining the lives of the characters and the conversations going on between them. Characters chat outside the pub or across the road by the chippy. Washing blows on the line in the backyard. A rickety fence needs a bit of work. Here a woman leans from an upstairs window, maybe to chat to a man cleaning windows – a neighbour or a window cleaner?
This could be any Midlands or Northern Town, a little like Coronation Street on a sheet or two of backing paper.
Looking a little closer though, I noticed a different type of humour. Not shop name puns but a glimpse of a lady undressing with the windows open.
A cheeky touch of seaside postcard humour here , glimpsed by some of the sharper eyed model railway commuters as the train trundles by?
I usually find railway layouts in magazines and exhibitions less of interest for the trains running up and down and more of interest for the scenery, the people and the tiny vignette details. Some model railway enthusiasts obviously have less interest or time for this aspect of their hobby.
In my 2006/7 scrapbook, on another long train journey for work (everything outside the West Country is a long journey) I scribbled and sketched down ideas about the people I saw in passing, how they were grouped or separate etc.
Hobos. Senior Citizens. Rebels. Lovers in Action (!) – Scrapbook page of tiny railway people from various magazines c. 2007/8
This was no doubt inspired by reading a railway modelling magazine with layouts and figure ranges pictured. If there are no interesting military modelling, wargames, toy soldier or history magazines that month on the station bookstall, I would sometimes choose a railway modelling one. They often had useful transferable tips on modelling, painting and weathering techniques, terrain and scenery design articles or some interesting history stories.
I do think that the shortened categories or stereotypes of human behaviour listed in the figure ranges is quite amusing – not quite all of human behaviour is yet here. I wonder what is missing? I will post on this another time.
Looking up at real life whizzing past the hurrying window, slicing through town, countryside, back gardens etc then looking back at the magazine’s railway layout pictures, gave an interesting switching perspective. Big, small, messy, neat, detailed, empty. Real, fake. It is the scale distortion joy or joke of the old fashioned model village or tiny people artists like Slinkachu.
Thoughts of what is going on in the heads of Peco Modelscene passenger set B is almost a Creative Writing stimulus exercise?
Still available the Peco Passenger Set B
On long journeys I would read both the adverts and the articles, taking a long, close, in-depth look at the photos, people, backdrops and details, trying to read between the lines at what is really going on when nobody is looking. If you could speech bubbles or thought bubbles above their heads, what would be in them? What preoccupies them in this frozen slice of imagined life or time as trains run past? Why no moving people?
I blame much of this Michael Bentine’s Potty Time, The Borrowers, The Twelves and other such stories of tiny people come to life but who freeze when there are “human beans” around.
Looking at the characters or Railway people types which appear with wearying regularity on layouts worldwide such as Passenger Set B, I wonder:
What is in the letter that the lady in yellow is about to post?
What is in the letter in his hand that the postman is about to deliver? What other things are in his bag?
What is in the bag or briefcase carried by the first man on the left?
Where is the sprightly cheerful lady in black and red heading off to? Who will she meet?
I notice a few Marple type figures amongst these Peco and Airfix figures. During Lockdown, I have been listening my way through the Agatha Christie BBC dramatisations of Poirot and Miss Marple (via my online local public library download).
Marples and Miniatures ? Murderer? Murdered? Miss Marple?
What’s in the envelope?
What is in these envelopes in people’s hands, the postman’s bag, the postbox on these layouts?
It reminds me of some lines from Night Mail by W.H. Auden, the rhythmic poem set to music to accompany the Thirties GPO Film Unit documentary:
“This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order …”
“Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door…”
“Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong …”
Navvies backed up by Victorian Civilians from the Airfix Waggon Train set.
Next post: I will add some alternative suggestions from my notebooks for railway modelling figures of some character stereotypes and modern civilian figures that I don’t think are yet made, but reading through some of the more bizarre figures on the Preiser lists, I’m not so sure …
… and as the backdrop to my tabletop games. 
Navvies backed up by Victorian Civilians from the Airfix Waggon Train set.
Sidetracked 