27th May 2025
Dick Moger St Mary’s 1950 -1955

Unscheduled Homework

I was lucky enough to have an older brother, who also attended St Mary’s, who was a keen model maker and our home was smothered in model aircraft and 00 railways.
One day be bought home what I now know was a Basset-Lowke steam locomotive that sowed the seeds of the garden railways that came later. In the meantime I carried on mostly making model aircraft.
One venture that amused my classmates (Class of 1950) was a V2 style rocket plane that was designed around a firework rocket that didn’t go bang at the end!
I took it up to Sidcup Place to launch it where it duly shot up into the sky and floated back to earth landing in Church Road where a car ran over it…. I wasn’t that upset and my classmates weren’t even remotely so..

After that I decided that railways gave a more lasting return for one’s efforts and, to the surprise of my new wife who thought she had married a guitar playing folk singer, suddenly found a railway growing in the garden.

This continued for most of my life and I now find myself as the president of the Gauge One Model Railway Association (G1MRA). The railway is still in the garden even if the house keeps changing!
These are mostly to my own design and build, and they work with real boilers and steam operated cylinders. So in a sense, not a lot has changed except these don’t get run over by cars…

This is the current railway that uses about 800ft of trackwork. Everything you see is homemade, apart from the track itself, which is mostly commercial these days.

Some that I made earlier!