‘Model trains are my meditation'

Photography by Dan Burn-Forti

Trains, both miniature and real, have been a mental-health rail replacement service for most of my life. One of my earliest memories is of playing with a Tri-Ang Class 31 diesel in an antique shop with such destructive enthusiasm that my dad felt obliged to buy it. My first layout was on a board that rolled out from under the bed and I would sit with my head on the carpet to watch at eye level, utterly mesmerised as my little tank engine tootled around. I graduated to a fixed layout in the corner of my room, creating narratives for the landscape Dad and I built around the tracks: stations, fields, roads, and a backdrop of homes and hills painted by my granny.

Sadly, the Beeching’s axe of puberty struck and in the early 1990s my layout was packed into boxes as music became a new obsession. It seemed a better fit for the chaotic anxiety and depression that came with not fitting in with the masculinity around me. However, boarding the slow train to middle-age in my 40s, I’ve wondered if my tendency to melancholy might be helped by a return to the hobby. Railways already help – when stressed, I find it calming to follow disused lines on maps and satellite photos. I can spend hours watching old documentaries from the British Transport Films and BBC Archive, like a 1960 film about a day in the life of the West Highland Line, featuring a radical score by the pioneering BBC Radiophonic Workshop that blends Scottish folk songs and the rhythm of the trains. I use playlists of steam-engine sounds to help myself sleep and if that doesn’t work and I’m awake in the small hours, I’ll drift off by imagining lines I might one day build. I’ve not had the time or space to bring these dreams into reality, but recently bought a plastic scale model of a corrugated-iron church to test the waters.

I am not alone in all this. Last year, model-railway manufacturer Hornby surveyed the motivations of hobbyists across the UK. Half of the 2,000 participants said their practice improved their state of mind, climbing to 80% among those specifically involved in model making. As I explored YouTube, I could see this manifested; how model railways online are about more than miniature trains. James Hilton, for instance, is a professional model-railway builder who regularly posts videos called Mindful Modelling, and blogs about how engines, large and small, help with his mental health. Dawn Quest, very much the face of a changing hobby, makes thoughtful films touching on these issues alongside the making of her monochrome layout based on the film Brief Encounter.

Using my Thomas the Tank Engine obsessed toddler as an excuse, I’ve been going to more model-railway exhibitions, the two of us lost in thought as we watch a tiny coal-hopper tip its load on to a powerstation conveyor belt. There’s something about the rattle and quiet whooshing of wheels on miniature tracks that I find calming. The more I return to the world of model railways, the more it strikes me that this is somewhere men who feel uncomfortable in other masculine realms can thrive. There’s none of the judgment or expectation that often comes with sport like physical prowess, fitting into group hierarchies, or joining in with banter.

I’m not always comfortable just going up to strangers and opening up a conversation, but I’ve found model railways are a fantastic way to get into a chat with someone you’ve never met before. This can be purely about the hobby (at my local park’s miniature-railway running last month I had a fascinating chat about steam injection valves), but it can easily go deeper. At a recent exhibition, I spoke to a man with an autistic daughter, for whom model-making was an important therapy; his layout offered respite from the stress of life as a carer.

Model railways encourage us to share skills and knowledge, especially at clubs. Some will be more interested in the electrical skills of getting power to the tracks and signals, others in the construction of scenery and buildings, or the collecting and running of pristine locomotives. There’s an unhurried air of sharing and problem-solving, with a bit of gentle piss-taking thrown in. A building on a layout might have been designed and constructed by someone no longer with us, and thus becomes their memorial. Over tea or pints, when men talk about railways, they’re also talking about themselves.

From this way into conversational intimacy to the joy of world-building, there’s something profoundly mind-expanding about all this. These are tiny worlds over which we have control. The depth into which you can imagine is infinite, the possibilities of a layout are endless. From deep research into long-closed railway lines at the start through to running a train, the process of creating a model railway can take years. Even then, no layout is ever really finished. Buildings can always be replaced and improved, new tracks added, the whole caboodle shifted into a different era. On my childhood layout, the trains just went round and round an oval, but the landscape they went through endured the Second World War and then closure, before being revived as a heritage railway. I spent hours on it, travelling through time.

This is why I keep finding myself looking up track plans of long-disused Norfolk branch-line stations and London’s lost dockland railways. It isn’t out of nostalgia for the railways of my youth, but more getting lost in the innocent pleasures of my childhood models – a time before I really knew what it was to be unhappy. Yet that seems too simplistic. It’s also the future-facing appeal of creating a new version of an old, vanished world, with a challenge to be met and overcome, with new creative and technical skills to be learned before the simple joy of hearing the rattle of tiny wheels on tracks.

A historian I spoke to told me that, for him, railway modelling was a way of “manifesting the historical imagination”, which strikes me as a very beautiful way of describing the sensation of melting from the everyday into what you’re building. I look at my kit of a corrugated-iron chapel – the grey plastic walls glued together, but still missing the roof – and can picture it sitting in a patch of grass behind my future railway line. I’ll add rust to the paint around a broken drain, imagining the interior and a tea urn bubbling in the corner that, as the years of Sundays go by, doesn’t quite need to make as many cups as it once did. The half-built chapel sits by my desk as a portal outside my own mind, more powerful than any meditation app.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the railways, and the electric-model version took off commercially around a century ago. As we reach these milestones, I wonder if the hobby has always had a therapeutic element, but only now are we finding a language to discuss it. In our age of masculinity-in-crisis, this tactile mental exercise of modelling, either alone or as part of a club community providing an outlet for those struggling in life, feels timely. It might even divert some away from the void of the online manosphere, something Hornby is investigating in a new survey this summer.

I can’t think of many hobbies subjected to more prejudice than railway modelling, with assumptions of awkward and nerdy insularity. Yet my trips around exhibitions have shunted away any that I’d held. There’s a generational shift happening, with more women and LGBT+ people joining clubs and visiting exhibitions, connecting emotional well-being with the joy of constructing little worlds out of plywood, metal, card, plastic and paint. As much as I try to make it happen using computer-aided model railway design software, I can’t fit a layout in my home. For now, the tiny corrugated-iron chapel will have to do, along with those sleepless nights when dreaming up layouts gives me hope of catching the last train to contentment.

With thanks to The Wonder Works, Margate, for the location (wonderworksmargate.co.uk)