At 94 cm long, the 54 kilo steam locomotive, driven by 13 cm wheels from power provided from 3.8 cm bore cylinders, had easily pulled eight people sitting precariously balanced astride platform carriages down a considerable length of the superbly restored Grand Hall in Alexandra Palace in north London.
Steam, the smell of hot oil, “Ally Pally,” January sleet, gray hair and bloggers with names such as “stub mandrel” — it can only be the Model Engineer Exhibition.
The UK tradition of model engineering in its modern form goes back at least to 1898 when it was sufficiently established to support the venerable Model Engineer Magazine. Just 10 years later, Stuart Turner founded Stuart Models selling raw castings for a single cylinder steam engine.
Turner was an engineer looking after a steam generating plant for a private estate in Henley on Thames. His business prospered and in 2012 is still operating, now as the most respected name in steam model engineering.
It would be easy to dismiss this annual gathering as a meeting of eccentrics who should “get a life.” Ironically, the majority of the attendees this year have lived most of theirs, and frequently, it has been a very productive one. They are certainly eccentric — off-center socially and very proud of it. To some extent they are social dinosaurs as the society that was built and prospered on their engineering skills has changed, with much of the UK and world economy based on the ephemera of service or financial industries that have little or no base in the material world.
However even in the modern world, if it moves, floats, flies, or for example in the case of a bridge stands, then an engineer has built it. The feedstock of engineers is in rapid decline. The nursery for engineers model engineering, the apprenticeships that produced engineers and the respect that accompanied men and women that could build things and make them work is in rapid decline. Vacuous media celebrity it seems is the career of choice for a disturbingly large proportion of young people.
And when the pathetic bleeping of a malfunctioning computer signals that the complex modern virtual edifice built of electrons is about to collapse, the soft susurration of live steam and the dull glint of an oiled crankshaft will remind you that complicating a system introduces entropy, an inbuilt instability that will lead inevitably to chaos.
Staring at the array of models, sometimes the result of thousands of hours dedicated work in home based machine sheds, gets the visitor thinking that way. This is no atavistic longing for a past golden age but more a conclusion reached by reflecting on the elegance and beauty of simple but enduring engineering artifacts.
Many are downright stirring as in the case of scale model steam trains. Some defy belief, as for instance the 25 cm long jet engines that push model aircraft through the atmosphere at over 300 kph. The builder of one such model confessed that he had to limit it “because the wings cracked and it was about to fall out of the sky.”
James Hill, both full size turbine-engineer and model engineer, was deep in conversation with a visitor over the merits of his latest miniature jet. Questioned about the power, he replied: “No, you’re right, it didn’t really need the afterburner but building it was fun to do.”
Therein lies the very essence of model engineering. The joy of creating a working miniature from scratch and encountering the challenges, problems and technical difficulties can be and was “fun” to generations of serious minded souls who live a goodly portion of their lives in garden sheds.
Perhaps even more importantly and if they needed to justify their existence, which they do not, they frequently tell the enquiring visitor that most experimental engineering projects start as small scale prototypes (models) and are scaled up.
Fittingly for James Hill, that is precisely what happened in the case of Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine. His working models provided him with the principles, which he patented in 1930 after the British government saw no value in an engine without pistons. The patented plans were, the story goes, “acquired” by Dr. Hans von Ohain, who was apparently working independently on the same idea that he patented in 1934 and so went on to build the full-size working version.
The essential element is that the jet engine began life as a model — Whittle’s was first successfully bench tested in 1937. Model engineers are simply engineers working on a scale different from the expectations of inhabitants of the popular world. Far from eccentric toy makers, these people are the ideas workshop and test-beds that prove concepts with working models.
Thirty or so years ago, a well known rather elderly figure, to my recollection only ever referred to as Mr. Bentham, sat in a beautifully tailored but slightly distressed suit as he traditionally did holding court at the exhibition with young potential modelers. Over tea and buns, he described in detail the workings of a simple device he had thought up as a boy. It was a single rail that ran from the butler’s pantry to his hobby shed a hundred meters from the house. At teatime, the young engineer would summon sandwiches, which would be mounted on a specially constructed tray that was placed on the single rail. Magically, it would rise a centimeter or so and travel the length of the rail to the hobby shed under the watchful eye young man.
Fast forward perhaps a century and see the same idea as the Maglev (magnetic levitation) high speed train in Japan operating on precisely the same principle. This is scaling up a model engineer’s prototype on the grand scale.
Sadly, many of the engineers at the exhibition are now in their mid or late lives and, on the evidence of this January’s gathering with its singular scarcity of young people, a new generation has not arisen to follow through. Even the sellers of die-cast plastic kits that used to attract thousands of young visitors only 10 years ago were not in evidence this year. Gone also are the gaggles of wide-eyed children staring at, for example, a solid metal WWII tank weighing 160 kilos, driven by twin electric motors and with full operating turret and engine sounds, clamoring round the owner asking: “Is that really made of metal, mister? Does the gun work?”
It was more an exhibition of pure model engineering with learned conversations such as: “I think that 4340 is an AISI code and as far as I know that equates to EN24 and the 817M40 is EN24. Incidentally, EN24 is also available in U, V, W, X, and Z but the condition X and Z are very, very tough…” between white haired retirees over curling homemade sandwiches and flasks of milky tea.
The visit to the Model Engineer Exhibition was more a case of a glimpse into the future than a case of “recherché du temps perdu.” It brought on a reflection on the changing value set in at least British society where the value of engineering and those who are involved in making things work is in serious decline.
Yet, the most powerful economies in the world are based on making things that people want to buy, and engineers build all of those things, or at the very least, the machines that produce them. And model engineering is where it all starts.
