MAN WITH A JOB THAT THOUSANDS ENVY

Press, 9 April 1977, Page 16

MAN WITH A JOB THAT THOUSANDS ENVY

From

CAROL KENNEDY,

in London

Chris Littledale has turned a favourite hobby into a business, and a thriving one at that. His tiny, eyrie-like workshop up flights of precipitous wooden stairs in a back street, on the borders of Brighton and Hove, on Britain’s south coast, would excite the envy of many a successful businessman with a secret passion for mode! railways.

For Littledale is Britain’s only full time model engineer and restorer — indeed, he believes he is the only one in Europe. On his workbench, littered with jewellers’ files, tiny cogwheels, paint samples and bits of sheet tin fashioned into cab roofs or locomotive smokestacks, he brings rusted hulks back to life and restores the gleaming liveries of long vanished lines such as the Great Northern and the Caledonian Railway.

Collectors from many parts of Europe and as far afield as Pennsylvania make the pilgrimage to his workshop. Most, of his continental business comes from Switzerland, where one customer owns what is claimed to be one of the largest and finest collections of model engines in the world — "room after room of them; goodness knowns what they must be worth,” says Littledale.

Occasionally, too. a museum will come to him with a restoration job, and his order book is already filling up for most of this year.

His services do not come particularly cheap, although when he first set up as a model restorer seven or eight years ago, after a period making architectural and civil engineering models, he says he vastly undercharged and ended up earning only about 50c an hour.

Restoring a badly damaged locomotive can run well into three figures — the most expensive iob Littledale can remember

worked out at $7OO — but it can be well worth it to a collector, considering the way in which values of model trains, even the commonest postwar Hornby toy sets, have multiplied in the last few years.

When Littledale started collecting as a schoolboy 15 years ago he picked up locomotives for 25c in junk shops. Today each one would be worth well over $2OO. In his top-floor flat, a short distance from his workshop and looking across a fashionable garden square to the English Channel, he has shelf upon shelf of beautifully restored engines and carriages on the walls.

They include delicately worked Pullman cars complete with miniature dining tables, lamps and luggage racks, a comprehensive collection of the British Hornby models — perhaps the best in the country — many examples of the German Bing and Marklin series, and rare pre-war New York Central Railroad locomotive and carriages.

Cupboards are filled with more trains, many in their original boxes, with piles of spare track and box upon box of assorted mechanical bits and pieces cannibalised from models too far gone for repair or not rare enough to be worth restoring.

There are two main types of model railway collecting — the “collectable tin toy” and the detailed scale model. But the fields overlap a good deal and many collectors seek both types.

Littledale is constantly amazed by the lasting quality of the pre-war clockwork tin train, even the cheapest type which was pressed out of preprinted tin and then bent into shape and secured bv tiny tongues of metal: they could not be soldered, as this would have burned the paintwork. The colours have in the main stood up extremely well both to the stress of

manufacture and to years of neglect. Scale models, detailed down to the tiny rivet heads around the chimney, are more tricky to repair but best of all Littledale enjoys working on what he calls “the old stuff” — pre-World War I models, often made by Bing for the British firm of Bassett Lowke. These were not built strictly to scale but have a solid and authentic look about them. Littledale said: “T often think they are like impressionist paintings of real locomotives. They are not meticulous in the same way as a scale model, but put one of them against a background of some trees and a bridge or two and you get a wonderful impression of the real thing.

“With a scale model everything around it has to be exactly in scale, too, and even then you can get a kind of frozen effect.” Littledale does some mechanical repairs, although he will send specialised jobs like armaiure winding out to an electrical expert. Mostly, though, his speciality is bodywork: he is more of an artist than an engineer. Many collectors, he says, can do simple repairs but when it comes to restoring — for example the authentic butcher blue livery of the Caledonian Railway —

they are lost. He mixes his own paints, working in cellulose enamel rather than the stove enamel common in pre-war days, and he has a file of paint samples giving the correct livery colours for a multiplicity of British railway companies of the 1900 s. He usually begins a restoration by taking a direct tracing off the locomotive or carriage: even if badly corroded this will normally show the outline of the faded livery and such details as engine number and company initials. These tracings in themselves have now built up into a considerable reference tool.