European Railroad Discussion > You almost have to be there to see a certain era in Britain

On the Model Railway Forum the question came up about European interest in model railways.

https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?3,4989617

I have enough British stuff to do a small layout, eventually. Before going to Britain I thought I could easily pick up and model whatever era I wanted to and it would be correct. Upon travelling around the United Kingdom for a month I realized that I would be better to attempt to represent what I had seen and took pictures of. My first trip was the whole month of September 2013 with my dad and the second trip was a couple weeks in the Summer of 2014 by myself. Yes, one of the reasons I spaced the trips that close together was to capture images on digital and more importantly in my mind to use later on the layout. A case in point for choosing to model the era I visited is seen here in Eastleigh on Sept 28 2013. Transrail only existed between 1994 and 1996. I was lucky enough to capture an open wagon which looks like ZCA  T(?)110732 still in Transrail livery albeit with a little graffiti.

I say I got lucky as my dad and I had rode from Nottingham to Derby on a Cross Country Class 170 then a Cross Country Voyager to Southampton Airport Parkway where we planned to ride a purple Velvet Bus to Southampton to continue by rail to Portsmouth. It started out chilly that morning. I still had my coat on whilst taking pictures in Derby but took the coat off in the Voyager since we would be on it for two and half hours. When we got off at Southampton Airport Parkway it was rather warm and humid. After the train rolled away I thought and asked my dad if he had got my coat when he pulled the stuff from the luggage rack. We then realized that I had left the coat in the overhead luggage rack. We got a ticket on the next train to Southampton Central and found that the coat had not been found but the Voyager was already headed back north. Quickly thinking I found we could take Southern Trains via Eastleigh out to Havant where we could get something (Southwest Trains) to Portsmouth. So I got a picture of a car in short lived livery around 17 years after Transrail had ceased to exist in exchange for a lost coat that I could replace using my uniform allowance. Hopefully another bus freak in Britain got a nice new fleece Metro coat! Oh yeah, we did miss gettting to ride on the Velvet Bus!

1) Tranrail Open Wagon obviously from the Southern Railway EMU.
2) Cropped to show the ZCA and the Transrail logo the T in a circle with the bars underneath.
3) A little before that was my dad on the right of the picture showing his dissapointment about leaving my coat on the train and not getting to ride the Velvet Bus. OK, we had finally stopped laughing by the time the bus showed up.

Thank you for looking! 

Jim

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