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Post by GentlemanJim on May 15, 2013 18:41:12 GMT
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Post by railtechnician on May 16, 2013 14:26:59 GMT
Like many youngsters my future in many things engineering began with a Meccano Set 00 when I was 8 or 9 years old. Prior to that we had tenants renting the ground floor of my parents first 'own' home. I knew them as Pop and Nanny and they became pretty much part of the family remaining such even after they retired to the coast and we moved to our second house in 1959. I and my sister got regular holidays with them on the coast for years afterwards. It was Pop that took me for walks along the canals, along railway sidings, to the gasworks, to the boiler house in the cinema and the projection room too while Nanny took me to parks and on many bus and coach rides. Pop had been an artillery man in WW1 on railway artillery in France and spent most of his working life as a gas fitter, later he worked at Qualcast Fleetway (remember clothes hand ringers!) and in retirement he kept himself busy with part time jobs in many interesting places. For a hobby he liked most things electrical and mechanical, I still recall his homemade precision engineered clockwork alarm clock. He encouraged me to use my imagination, I had to because I had few manufactured toys and so I spent lots of time playing with wood offcuts, bits of pipe and all sorts of rejected cast parts before I got my first Meccano set. I never did get a number 10 set, in fact the last set I got was a number 4 as I recall but with some collected parts at jumble sales I had enough parts to build some decent models. Even now I can recall the long walk to the toy shop to get my Meccano clockwork motor which I had saved odd pennies for, for months, and how disappointed I was when I found I didn't have enough money as the retail sales tax (remember that's what we had in the days before VAT) had gone up while I had been saving! I didn't get pocket money as such but my mother found the extra 2d or 3d and I made the long walk to Elsey's toy shop once more to claim my reward.
I was still using Meccano as an adult though not as a toy, it was handy for mounting odd equipment like a uniselector or for creating a framework as part of a cosmetic fibreglass car repair, indeed many professional engineers used to use Meccano for prototyping new machinery. I had a pal who was a Meccano collector, he used to buy up large quantities found in Exchange & Mart (what we had before Loot and Ebay etc!). First thing he did was to sift through what he had purchased and remove all the parts not made in the UK, he reckoned that Meccano made in South America and other parts of the world used inferior metal and diod not regard it as genuine even though it carried the name. He had enough Meccano to build a scenic railway in his front room much to the annoyance of his wife at the time!
I did have a few Dinky toys but not many at all, what I did have were second or third hand 1950s models handed down to me by my parents friends after their children had outgrown them. I was also gifted a very handsome electric 'O' gauge train set with a beautiful loco with start and reversing levers in the cab, there was also a reversing lever rail section which was easier than trying to use the lever in the moving cab. There were two or three tinplate wagons and a working tinplate snow plough too. As I grew older I moved on to Hornby '00' and I gifted the 'O' gauge set to a former primary school friend, that set would be worth £££s today as it was well looked after like all my toys.
Funny how long forgotten memories come flooding back, what Hornby started seems to have longevity despite all that exists to keep young and old entertained these days. Even now I have a Hornby LT 0-6-0 tank on my mantelpiece and a vast collection of die cast models albeit mostly anything except Dinky because EFE, Corgi, Sun Star, Lledo and other companies products are so much more detailed.
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