Dick Strawbridge interview for The Biggest Little Railway in the World

19 December 2017

The Biggest Little Railway in the World is an absolutely bonkers idea. Explain the concept behind it.

It’s a very British idea – part of me says that it’s bonkers, but it’s very British. It’s a very simple idea: The Victorians failed to build a railway along the Great Glen Way, and it was one part of the railway network in Scotland that was never built. So we had the idea of building a model railway across Scotland. It just had to be done. So we did it, along the Great Glen Way. Model railway enthusiasts are a very maligned bunch, people don’t understand them, but it was a great opportunity to get a bunch of like-minded people together. They were a very diverse group, in ages and genders and interests, all very different, but all untied by a love of model railways.

 

Why did you want to get involved?

I’m a very simple person. I love a challenge and a bit of fun. And I like working with people as well. And I thought that this would be almost impossible to do, and I was intrigued. But it was such an opportunity to get together and do something bordering on the ridiculous, but also something that provided an opportunity for people to get out and do something together. I’m always up for a challenge, and to spend a couple of weeks in Scotland was not to be missed. Scotland in June is not like Scotland in January, but it’s still pretty challenging. We were eaten by midges, the weather changed every day, we had sunshine, wind, rain, fog, and it was the most amazing place – so beautiful.

 

How did you go about recruiting your team of model railway enthusiasts?

We put out the call for volunteers among model railway groups. We also went and looked for some grown up engineering jobs – I don’t mean that in an age sense, I meant that in terms of size. And we auditioned them, we gave them challenges to see what skills people had. You’ve got to remember, model railway enthusiasts tend to have quite a solitary life. Yes, they go to clubs, they meet people and do things, but if you’re working on a railway set-up or what have you, that takes up a lot of your time. One of the chaps had spent the best part of a year building a bridge, where every stone was perfect to the original. That’s dedication, and the most amazing amount of graft, but it’s also very different from being dropped in the deep end up at Fort William. So we wanted to meet people. And we wanted them to know how serious it was. I made sure the people I spoke to knew that it was going to be amazing, but bloody hell, we’d know we’d done it by the end! And it was such a phenomenal and arduous task, it was something that couldn’t be overstated.

 

And it was a really mixed group?

Oh yes, we had some fit young bucks that I made work extra-hard, we had some slightly older gentlemen, we had a mixture of ladies of all ages – I never asked their age, obviously! They all did something that very few of them ever thought they could do, because we must have walked <hundreds of miles each. By the end, we knew the Great glen Way very well.

 

Give us an idea of the scale of the project. How far were you going, and what was the timescale you were working with?

We had twelve days, to go over 70 miles from the West Coast to the east Coast of Scotland. That involved all the building, and getting the train from one end to the other. In terms of scale, you’re talking about basically half of the trans-Siberian railway built in 12 days. And some of the hills we had to go over were pretty tall – in terms of scale, one of them was the equivalent of one-and-a-half Everests. And Silver Lady, our little steam engine, was meant to pootle around on nice level ground, with the occasional very gentle incline of a couple of degrees. She was not built to cross Scotland. That, in its own right, was one of the big challenges. Chris, who came along from the company that actually made Silver Lady, he spent all his time keeping it on the road. We had major overhauls on a nightly basis. At one stage, we had to take the train and run it into the wee small hours of the morning, to keep it going, so we could get the miles under our belts. One coast to the other is a hell of a long way for a little engine.

 

It was clearly quite a stressful undertaking – tempers certainly frayed from time to time, didn’t they?

Oh yeah, you’d better believe it. People were out if their comfort zone. By the time we were five days in, people began to contemplate the idea of it being a glorious failure. We couldn’t go beyond 12 days – people had taken holidays from work, they had to go back. And so the pressure was really on. And it was a really big group of people – we had a whole support team as well, everybody had to get fed and transported. We had 29 tonnes of track to move around. Everybody was absolutely jiggered by the end, seriously pooped. They gave body and soul. The teams became real teams together. Nobody knew anyone else, but by the end, people had made lifelong friends.

 

What was the atmosphere like on camp, and how did you all occupy yourselves of an evening?

The whole thing about the navvies in the Victorian times was beer, beef and brothel, that was their entertainment in the evenings. We didn’t provide the brothel part, I should point out, but the beer and the beef was present. People had a drink, and got fed. And it was a roaming camp, we had to move from place to place, and whenever a move took us to within walking distance of a pub, that was very easy to see what would happen in the evening. The whole army marching on its stomach idea is true – people have to be fed and looked after. And probably half of the people had brought their own trains along, so there was a fair bit of playing with that on the track, and swapping stories. They were such a good bunch. Everyone thinks of model railway enthusiasts as being a bit anorak-y – but get a bunch together, they know how to party.

 

Do you feel you understand the fascination with model railways?

Model railways I understand. My eldest son is 33, and 30 years ago he had his first Hornby train set. My youngest son is four – he’s not quite ready for it yet, he’s got the wooden railway. So it’s something that’s been a part of all of our lives. It’s part of our psyche. But model railway enthusiasts are a different level. They’ve decided to make the most perfect set-up, or the most amazing collection. In some way, they continue to spend time with it when most of us have moved on from it. They have a fascination for recreating, and for making the most amazing things. For me, my fascination isn’t the precision and the finesse. Who doesn’t like playing with a railway? I think we’ve all got Thomas the Tank Engine in our blood. But for this project, all that precision was no good. The whole idea of spending a year recreating a bridge, we had to get beyond that mindset. We needed to blast along the Great Glen Way for nearly two weeks, get the track down, and get the biggest little railway in the world going. And they all bought into it.

 

What were the biggest obstacles you had to overcome?

Midges. I think this year in Scotland there was an increase in the midge population of 50 per cent. There were something like 49 billion extra midges. We had mountains. We crossed the Caledonian Canal. One of the bridges we built looked a bit like the bridge over the River Kwai. That was a phenomenal thing. Alec Guinness would have been happy if he’d seen it. But those obstacles were not as difficult as the physical obstacle of getting the job done, because it’s relentless. The number of miles, every day, that had to be done, and the number of pieces of track required, it was so tough. It was fine when it was all flat and in a straight line, like along the towpath of a canal. But when you got to a cross country section, along the side of a loch, it was something else. We were having to wear nets because of the midges, and we’d have to walk two miles in because there was no road access, carrying all the track. But one thing I did like is that people got to appreciate how beautiful that part of Scotland was.

 

Did you ever think you wouldn’t do it?

I’m not going to reveal what happened at the end. But it was tough towards the end. We couldn’t lay the last day’s track until the last day, because we couldn’t leave track running through Inverness. We had to get to the outskirts of Inverness by the 11th day. That was not trivial, by any stretch. And the train had to make up miles, she had to catch up. So we had to work really tough shifts. People were getting utterly exhausted.

 

Did this take you back to your army days? The camping, the problem-solving, the camaraderie?

I think the colonel came out in me. I I became very logistics oriented, and I cajoled and bullied my way around, to the point where I made the production crew, the people actually making the TV show, helping out. I even had executives from the company laying track. I made them work through the night. I don’t think there was anyone involved in this who didn’t do something physical towards building the track. If someone came and delivered lunch, they lay track or moved track or helped carry things. That was my military side. I didn’t ask, I just told. But we had to. But it meant that, at the end, everybody felt they’d been part of something amazing, working together as a team.

 

Were you worried about leaving the track unprotected overnight?

We had security – especially when we went through towns and things. There was a lot of respect. We actually had lots of people looking after us. People came out and watched the train go by. The local people were so helpful. We did have some incidents where vehicles had run over the track, and we had to re-lay it, but I don’t think there was anything malicious. People were very aware of what we were doing. And they respected it. People bought into it. And wherever the little train was, there were kiddies, but there were also middle aged people and grandparents. All sorts of people just enjoying the train going by.

 

Did this experience give you a tiny insight into the challenges faced by your Victorian forebears?

I never forgot that. We all talked about it a lot. Ours was a different challenge, much lighter and much faster.

 

What’s happened to Silver Lady? Do you feel emotional about her?

The before and after pictures say it all. We took a pristine, beautiful-looking steam engine, and we gave back something that had done the impossible, and had the edges knocked off it. She was covered in scars, and she had lost an awful lot of bits. But what’s left at the end is actually with the company who made it, and I think that’s a good place for it. I like the fact that she’ll be on display. I want kids to see it, and talk about how far it travelled, and ask how it did it, and what the terrain was like. The engine was never meant to do things like that.

 

Hearing you talk about this, it clearly meant so much to you.

When you work with people, you buy into it, you work together and you pull together. It doesn’t matter what your challenge is, there’s a sense of achievement at the end of it. And when you’re going through it, and people are having problems, and there are ups and downs, you get through it. And you see real camaraderie. And about halfway through this I just forgot that I was presenting a TV programme. As far as I was concerned, there was a bunch of us who were going to do something silly, and we were going to do it together. I talk fondly about it because it was amazing. And the people were amazing. I loved the way they changed over the time we were together. I am humbled to have had the opportunity to work with them.

 

The Biggest Little Railway in the World is on Sundays from 7th January at 8pm on Channel 4.