Not track plans but memories…

Just the one, singular, solo, solitary image…

Oh, how now I wish you took more, advancing your Kodachrome and exposing that emulsion, locking that moment, that place, you, in time.

Still, more, I long to sit alongside you, equal, at your study desk. Enthralled by exploring you, a man so important to me, through stories and places, memories, of a time before I existed.

Emotion is a powerful fuel and when blended with story telling is, I think, that which marks the difference between great modelling and great models…

This one photo (found last summer) rekindled a forgotten flame, the Prairie branchline railways of Saskatchewan and Alberta. This yearning to create something of a feeling, of a memory of someone and hence, somewhere important. 

If only I can find a way to distill it to something I can craft, in this moment, to connect with that one.  

I’ve found myself circling back around several times to slides of the Prairies and the desire, the need to tell this story. The opening prose is an attempt to weave another layer in to this adventure - to not shy away from the emotions and the connection to Dad - but to instead recognise, and embrace those memories that surface…

So let’s start with the hard facts… Prairie railways need space. More space even than a GWR branchline! Long trains, long sidings… what is worse, operation is prototypically limited, certainly unless you can fit in something of that repetition at each town, each elevator along the line; and even in N, if I took over the whole bottom room, I’d barely have space for two towns… it just doesn’t work.

Instead, thinking about the cameo, the crop; how could the key elements be distilled? I’m back on a familiar, well trodden and safe path…

The key element is not the track plan but the memories.

…and then it dawns on me. The key element is not the track plan but the memories. For me these are trackside, of small towns, general stores and cold Pepsi. Despite hours alongside these parallel steel ribbons I rarely saw more than a few grain cars at each elevator… the railway is incidental.

And so, the rather peculiar sketch shows a concept that breaks the rules if a model railway. It isn’t, rather it’s a model of a memory, of emotion. This is interesting, for whilst it isn’t the answer, it is perhaps, the start of the conversation…

Expect more, at some point. Until then though, more soon…

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