A Railway and Modelling Heritage

Railway Modelling offers a huge, diverse range of interests and skills to the modeller.  Each of you will have your own preferences and specialities, whether scenery, electronics, making rolling stock or simply watching the trains go by – to name but a few.  While some will focus on modern railways, others will delight in recreating long lost railways , bringing an interesting historical and sometimes even industrial archaeological aspect to the hobby..

For us as a business there is delight in design, detail, and simply the business of making something that correctly represents a period or prototype. This made me wonder how this interest in railways started.  Looking back it was several things: the fascination of seeing an abandoned line wandering through a yard overgrown with trees and wondering what it had been like when it was working. Then a trip on the Talyllyn Railway to experience narrow gauge steam and the idiosyncrasies of the narrow gauge.  Modelling came about through being given an early set of Hornby Tinplate track and rolling stock and then progressed through to OO gauge and a largely Tri-ang based layouts.  (Tri-ang catalogues were a real joy!) Model railway clubs too were a great encouragement and then an interest in more precise modelling through Protofour and Scalefour with diversions into N Gauge and OO9.

Personal links to railways are important too with family members being involved at the start of the Teifi Valley Railway preservation movement and before that, relatives farming close to the Carmarthen and Cardigan Railway – including taking a pig to the station in a motorcycle and sidecar (the pig going in the sidecar).  There’s a prototype worth modelling!

All this then feeds into Forge Model Works and makes it not only a personal enterprise but an exciting business dedicated to supporting the diverse community of modellers with both products and services.