Fred's Trains Page

My first contact with trains was at a very early age. The house where I spent the early years of my life had a railway embankment at the end of the garden and I spent my childhood with steam trains and railcars rumbling past. My route to junior school crossed the line and my friends and myself would time our arrival to coincide with trains leaving the local station. We would position ourselves on the foot-bridge so get the full effect of smoke, steam and ash as the train accelerated away. There is also a possible genetic link as my father was a shunter on the railway.   As I grew up my interest in trains was replaced with the more usual pursuits of motorcycles and girls. So for many years railways held no real interest for me, until a friend at work started work on an N gauge model railway. This rekindled the flame and soon I had a small N gauge layout of my own. By this time I had been a regular visitor to France for many years and when I would return home from a visit the uniform colours of my GWR layout would pale against the vivid coloured stock I had seen abroad. So, goodbye GWR and hello SNCF. Over a period of a couple of years I built a reasonably large layout based on (then) currant French practice. I soon discovered that French railways were a very minority taste and that trade support was minimal. Luckily the SNCF Society is a great source of information and Victors shop in London (now sadly closed) was a gold mine for people modeling foreign railways. With their help, and shopping expeditions when abroad, I was able to source what could not be scratch built.   After a few years I became increasingly frustrated by the limits of N gauge, my engineers sized hands could not really cope with tiny items I was trying to manipulate and I was dissatisfied with lettering that looked like graffiti and tiny people that appeared to have received dreadful facial injuries. So goodbye N gauge and hello HO. And that's where I am now, my present layout being based on the south-east of France sometime in the 1970s-80s period.   While all this modeling activity was going on I was also in pursuit of the real thing. A trip to Birminham taught me how to drive a train. Trips to France now included train spotting, (no I don't possess an anorak and I've never recorded a loco number in my life), wandering around stations taking pictures (officially not allowed until recently) and most of all travelling on the preserved railways of France.   The picture at the top of the page is of  a Billard railcar on the Vivarais railway