Hilton and Mears: Interchange…

In the beginning somebody had a commodity they wanted to move from place x to place y. Man gave way to horse and cart, canal to two ribbons of iron and the tramway was born. Today steel threads weave across the planet allowing the safe and efficient transfer of commodities from place x to place y millions of times a day. Welcome to the railway…

“We expected a boatload of cars today,” Baldwin said Wednesday morning. “Nothing happened.”

That line was in an article Aimee Caruso wrote in Valley News, in January 2013 about the Claremont Concord Railroad and it was one of those illuminating moments that profoundly helped me see a world beyond my reach. When we evaluate the health of the local railway, we don’t consider that every car that’s Here must have a corresponding origin There. At Claremont, carloads of salt originate somewhere else, were delivered to Claremont Junction by someone else, and only moved their last couple of miles on Claremont Concord rails. A railway is a cooperation, a communication medium, made possible by more than one, a conveyance across distance.

This honest Athearn RTR car was bought and the model born for one purpose - Trans-Atlantic interchange. You see as much as my Beaverbrook is in reality disconnected from those ribbons of steel it is my imagination that can see it interchanged across North America. The act of physically interchanging it from my Here to your There adds layers to the experience. The joy of recognising its familiar form on your slice of short-line reality is so much more powerful than it just disappearing into the stock drawer.

Just like a load of salt, spotted off Mulberry Street in Claremont, this car originated on a stretch of railway far away and was delivered to where my railway interchanges with “the rest of the world” by someone else. It didn’t escape to the staging yard or stock drawer. It ran on other rails, somewhere else. Another “Somebody else” carried it from there to here. When we got the call it had arrived at the very real mailbox interchange a member of my “crew” received it and by way of my own rails, we rolled it into place. Not just a last mile, but the latest mile?

Just as this car represents the mechanistic interchange of the prototype I love that it is also a wonderful representation of a more human interaction. How a model created because of friendship, conversation, ideas and energy exchanged from Here to There, finds itself the physical manifestation of both types of interchange, and a deeper more personal creation for it.

I believe that when we make things we leave a moment of our experience in our work and I like that when I handle this car there’s a feeling my friend did too. A hobby about models is about touch. Without touch there is no “make”. I guess it’s the same about the railway as a medium for connection from Here to There. The truest “real” in realistic.

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In case you weren’t aware ‘labels' are a great way to navigate the blog. Chris and I have co-created a lot of material over he last few years, labelled 'hiltonandmears'. He has also contributed to a number of my rambles, labelled 'chris Mears'. Until next time though, more soon...