Henry GreenlyReviews

Greenly is a name to conjure with in railway circles: he is best-known today for the big steam locomotives he designed and built for miniature railways like the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch. However, as is clear from this book of 1924, his interests weren't confined to steam locos: he was keen to promote the then rather new model railway hobby in all its aspects.

This is a very practical, hands-on introduction to the subject, illustrated with a huge number of sketches and plans - if I'd been a boy in the 1920s and got a copy of this in my Christmas stocking, I'd have headed straight out to the workshop to start building something. For the modern reader, it's more of an historical curiosity: it gives an idea of what it must have been like in those days when there were very few commercial products available for modellers, and you had to build practically everything from scratch if you wanted to progress beyond the circle of tinplate track on the living-room carpet. One chapter just deals with materials that you could use for rails and track fixings, another has detailed instructions for building points and crossings in various scales.