BBC4 had a great evening of programmes based around Dr Beeching two nights ago. Rather brave of the channel - an under-utilised service catering to a minority market and subsidised by the rest of the network - to draw attention to itself in this way, I feel. Tories might have watched. But I’m sorry to report that the spirit of the mad axeman still stalks the land.

(No, I haven’t had a closure notice served on my two yards of gravel trench. Even Beeching never managed to shut ‘em down this fast, although I’m prepared to believe that he used to lie in bed dreaming of serving a closure notice two seconds after the last rail chair was bolted into place. “This line has already cost the taxpayer millions and not a single passenger has ever travelled over it!”)

This is my N gauge model railway layout. Oh yes, I’ve been Sad for years. It was begun in 1994 (why yes, I was living alone and didn’t go out much at the time, how did you guess?) as a home for the small collection of rolling stock my dad bought me as a replacement for the Hornby OO stuff we never had enough room for back before my pubescence. I built a wooden frame, very much in the MFI style only without their legendary stability, stuck a board on top, put down cork tiles and laid the track down to conform to the little rural branch terminus I’d planned out years previously (I’m sure you’ll admire the way I managed to put five sets of points in a row - yeah, that’ll work well). I even wired it up. And that’s not all - there’s another baseboard too, only that one has absolutely no track at all. And then I errr…stopped.

Partly this was a growing apathy with the whole idea, probably as it was sidelined by something else like Oasis albums or Friends on Friday nights or a job that regularly took me away from home. But mainly it was because I simply couldn’t figure out how to join the two boards together. Oh, I knew what all the options were. But I couldn’t seem to get hold of any of the bits regularly mentioned as in use in Railway Modeller magazine (…I mean, I was incredibly Sad back then). What the heck are “pattern-makers’ dowels” and who on earth still sells them in this millenium?? Nor could I quite commit to a plan for joining the wires up, or building the scenery, or even where to put the power supply. Oh, these were laughably trivial obstacles for anyone motivated and practical, but I was more a “curl up on the sofa and read about someone else’s clever work” kind of shirker.

And behind all that, I somehow couldn’t quite muster the enthusiasm for actually running teeny-tiny engines driven by buzzing electric motors. It seemed to be an approximation of everything but the spirit of a railway. Particularly when a large hand descends to give the obstinate loco a careful shove forward. I mean, those little live steam locos I linked right at the start actually look and sound like the full size thing - because they pretty much work on the same principles. Graham Farish and Hornby are never going to compete with real chuffers (well OK, Hornby actually do offer live steam OO models to bored executives these days, but they’re still a bit small).

So when I finally bought my own place, I carefully bore the proto-layout to the large basement area, propped it against a wall and tried to forget about it for the next ten years while I played with computers instead. Until now, when I suddenly remembered that you can flog this stuff on eBay (in the “Collectables” category, hint hint) when you want a few spare shekels. And that’s what I’ll be doing for the next few weeks, gradually selling the bits off for whatever I can get. The amount raised will be laughably minute in comparison to the amounts I’d like to spend (‘twas ever thus), but at least I won’t feel like I’m accruing abandoned hobbies in the basement again.

The drumkit’s staying though. For now.

(Christian Wolmar has a more cogent analysis than anything BBC4 managed, as enjoyable as their programmes were. He also has a new history of the British railway system out, Fire and Steam, which is getting some strong reviews on Amazon.)