People often ask me, as somebody who is kind of semi-well-known for being into trains,
do I have a model railway? And if so, can they see it? The answers are yes and yes. I don't have
a huge amount of space, so I've been working on this little thing in such spare time as I have.
Call it an executive toy, something I built for fun rather than pure realism. It's pretty basic,
I'll admit. Just an oval of track depicting a narrow gauge line in an unspecified location,
could be more or less anywhere in the British Isles or Northern Europe. Depends how I feel.
It could also represent more or less any era. You see, I have various narrow gauge models,
because I find them quite quirky and a little bit cute, and I wanted this to be a place where
I could run any of them without them looking out of place. Something I particularly wanted a home
for was my collection of Playcraft models. Now, unfortunately, my one Playcraft locomotive is
being temperamental today, so there is no footage, only photos. A little bit about Playcraft.
Playcraft was a French brand owned by Jouef, who made a small range of narrow gauge models.
And when I say "a small range," it was four items. One loco, one coach, a tipper wagon and
a bolster wagon that I don't have. Oh, and there was also track, but i'm not bothered about that.
Technically the stock is supposed to be a scale called HOe, which is 1/87 full size,
but the limits of motor technology mean that this locomotive is way oversized. it's about
one seventy-second.. one seventy-twoth... one seventy-half? I don't know. The range was pretty
popular in Britain, even though it depicted French rolling stock, because in the late 60s (when the
range made its debut), no one was making models of British narrow gauge trains ready-to-run,
and these didn't look too out of place in a British setting. I've always been quite fond
of old-school narrow gauge model railways, and I always used to enjoy flipping through old train
magazines from the 60s, 70s and 80s, where you'd get all these layouts with chopped up or repainted
Playcraft trains. You still see that kind of thing even today, sometimes. I think they're
quite delightful. And that rather conveniently brings us to today's sponsor - Readly.
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in the description below to check it out. Now, where were we? Something about trains, I think.
Alright everyone, I'm going to have to give you a content warning. I'm going to be butchering
French pronunciation from here on in. From this point forward, expect the massacre of a
noble and poetic language. The Playcraft range was based on the products of the Decauville company,
and that's quite appropriate. Decauville was a French company, founded in 1875 by Paul
Decauville. The Decauvilles had an estate where sugar beet was farmed and stone was quarried.
Young Paul built a narrow gauge railway to take stone from the quarry. In 1875, by which time Paul
had inherited the estate, disaster struck. Weeks of rain had turned the ground into a quagmire.
The crop of sugar beet - a particularly fine one that year - could not be collected. Decauville had
a brainwave. Lay a temporary railway using spare equipment from the quarry railway. The harvest
was completed successfully, and this gave Decauville another brainwave - go into
manufacturing railway equipment. His concept was a railway that was effectively a full-size train set
pre-made sections of track and small-sized rolling stock, that could be transported to wherever you
needed a railway, bolted together and away you go. No individual component, be it locomotive,
wagon or track, was to be larger or heavier than could be carried on the back of an elephant,
which made it easier to transport and safe to lay on all but the worst ground conditions.
I'm guessing Monsieur Decauville envisaged it being used in France's colonies. I don't
recall elephants being very common in France, but I'll admit it's been a while since I've been
there. The system was a big hit and was copied by many other companies. Decauville also licensed his
system out to other manufacturers. In an era when roads were poor and road vehicles primitive, a
lightweight portable railway that you could easily reconfigure was something a lot of industries
could use. The French army were particular fans. The modular design and quick assembly
made it ideal for use in military operations - if a section was damaged, you could just swap it out.
If the front line advanced, just pull the old line up, put it on a cart and re-lay it elsewhere.
Thousands of kilometers of track were laid on the Western Front during the First World War.
After the war, the now surplus equipment was sold off, which added low cost to its many
virtues. In fact, the term "Decauville railway" became a household phrase of sorts - if you
described something as a Decauville railway, people would instantly know what you meant.
The locomotive Playcraft chose to model is a type 1. Aside from the scale issues, I think they did a
pretty good job of capturing the look. The engine they chose to depict was one called Steatite.
This was a real engine from the Chemin de Fer de la Demain de Cobazet, or Cobazet Estate Railway,
as we would say in England. If we had cause to. Which most of the time we don't, to be honest.
The railway was built to transport soapstone from a quarry on the estate. Soapstone is a
mineral heavy in talc, which is used for various things, but you probably know it best as talcum
powder. Another name for soapstone is steatite. The locomotive Steatite differed slightly from the
model. It was fitted with a broader funnel and had sandboxes added at the back to increase the weight
and improve the balance. Perhaps Playcraft decided something more generic would be a better seller.
The sandboxes were necessary because the lightweight engine had a tendency to slip.
My example is similarly badly behaved, so that's prototypical at least. The wagons, I'm guessing,
are based on standard products, but I haven't been able to find any information online and all the
Decauville tipper trucks I found photos of look rather different from these. The coach, though,
appears to be directly based on type SE coaches used at the Exposition Universelle, or World's
Fair, in Paris in 1889. The centrepiece of the fair was a structure known as the Eiffel Tower,
which will look great when they finish it. You know, put some cladding on, some window boxes,
maybe stick some adverts at the top to pay for it all. If you own the Eiffel Tower, drop me a line,
we'll come up with something. Also on display was a railway by Decauville. The locomotives were
mostly larger articulated examples of the Mallet type, like this, or the Pechot-Bordon type, like
this. The line's main purpose was to transport visitors around the very large exhibition site,
but it was also an advert for the company's products - and a very successful one, I might add.
The coaches bore the names of places around the world where the Decauville system had been
successfully used. It's one of these coaches that Playcraft chose to model, minus the name. Coaches
like this with open sides are often nicknamed "toastracks" for obvious reasons. More officially,
they're described as semi-open, i.e they have a roof but no sides. One of my coaches has a price
tag of 74p, but, well, you'll be very lucky if you pay that for one of these today. Decauville didn't
just make railways. They also made bicycles, cars, tanks and agricultural machinery among
other things. But it's undoubtedly the railways for which they're best known. Decauville himself
was ousted from the company after it went public near the end of the 19th century, but don't worry
about him - he was an inventive fellow and he made a second fortune in concrete. The company survived
narrow gauge railways falling out of fashion after the Second World War thanks to their
ventures in other kinds of machinery, and was certainly still going in the 80s. The Decauville
company in theory still exists, or at least the name is still registered. So that's the tale of
the full-size train sets that were sold all over the world and the tiny train sets they inspired.
Well, I do hope you enjoyed today's video and this brief look at what I do in my spare time.
If you did, please do click the like button and subscribe for more. Thanks again to Readly for
sponsoring today's video. Click on the link in the description or the pinned comment
below to take advantage of their offer, and I'll see you all again very soon. Cheerio!