About the Collection
This whole website is very much ‘under construction’, starting from early 2025, and it may be some time before there is sufficient content to make alot of sense to users. However, the intention is to become a fun and educational resource for learners, modellers and enthusiasts alike, listing all of the locomotibve classes and types that have operated on British Railways over the last century or so – but using model trains as the ‘showcase’.
The navigation menus will hopefully take on more of a sense of purpose as the site is gradually populated with content.
- Each blog post will focus on an individual locomotive class, displaying the models representing that class from Craig’s collection – plus links to many other useful reference resources (such as class histories, numbers and names, liveries, allocations, rebuilds, incidents, published books and magazine articles, etc).
- All posts will be tagged with the key characteristics of each loco, such as companies, designers, class / class family, wheels, power, liveries, era modelled, build / running / withdrawal dates, preservation, etc…
- The navigation menus at the top will guide visitors around the collection, to…
- …collection pages that curate all loco blogs relevant to each category – so you can view all LNWR locos, all Churchward designs, all 4-6-2 Pacifics, all 3F powered goods engines, all WW2 liveried locos, preserved steam, narrow gauge diesels, etc etc… or select multiple filters at once.
- Photographs of the collections will mostly be displayed from Flickr galleries (and videos via Youtube), so that these are also accessible to social media users worldwide – to share the love of model trains!
It is hoped to progress enough content on the site to officially ‘launch’ as part of the Rail200 celebration year over 2025.
The Face behind the Project – so far
Craig Owen has been collecting model trains since the age of 5. As well as amassing a beautiful collection of models, he has also built 2 garden railways with popular online followings, ‘The Blackbury Line‘ (2007-2019) and the ‘Wye Valley Garden Railway‘ (2020-present).
Whilst Craig’s main project of recent years has been a slowly building a reproduction of Hereford (Barr’s Court) from 1900s-1960s, he also owns 2 very popular exhibition layouts: ‘Artists Valley‘, originally built for the 2023 Warley Show and acquired from Paul Bambrick, and ‘Maenorwic‘, a 009 slate quarry layout first built by Chris Phillimore.
Craig’s interest in trains started early – and shows no signs of abating!
Craig running LNWR / LYR trains on the Wye Valley Garden Railway, 2023.
