Section Members
Denis 'Art' Holland
Denis (one 'n') has been with the section from the start, and is the sections artist. Denis has done almost all of figures and vehicles on Pine Bluffs, as well as designing the Pine Bluffs logo. Denis has a wide variety of modelling interests, including HO American.
Sometime in the early fifties I received a train set as a birthday or Christmas present. It was tinplate, clockwork and featured a steam outline engine and three carriages. I cannot remember more about it other than that I soon got bored seeing it go round and round a circle of track. Later in around 1960 I used to regularly leave my home in Portsmouth to cycle towards Hilsea Halt on the main line between Cosham and Fratton. Heading down the wonderfully named Rat Lane I pushed my bike over the footbridge past the ever present train spotters and cycled on to... Portsmouth Airport! Yes, I was a teenage plane spotter (a dodgy activity these days) and had not the slightest interest whatsoever in those nasty, dirty, smoky things that ran along the railway line.
Fast forward to 1973. I had become interested in buses and discovered that one of my work colleagues shared the same interest. Moreover he was also into railways and together we visited some railway attractions at weekends, such as Eastleigh Open Day, the Bluebell Railway and the Didcot museum. However it was a kind of false start because I then went on to discover old commercial vehicles, cars, traction engines, tractors, military vehicles, ships, in fact anything but trains!
In the early 1990s I was collecting Lledo models and bought a set of three vehicles purporting to belong to the North Yorkshire Railway. Partly because I wanted to check the authenticity of the models I started looking around for books about that railway. I found a little book at a book fair in Alton and was so intrigued by the little Pug engine that operates on that line that I visited the Ian Allan bookshop behind Waterloo Station. I came away with two of those little Shire books, one on industrial locomotives and the other on industrial narrow gauge railways. That was finally the moment when I became hooked. Narrow gauge railways became a kind of obsession and I searched out all the books and magazines available.
From British narrow gauge I discovered the Colonel Stephens railways and all those little minor standard gauge lines that tend to get overlooked by the Big Four. American narrow gauge came next, then American standard gauge. Curiously I only then noticed modern British traction when, during a visit to Didcot, I saw four class 37s coupled together coming into the station. This was around the time that Lima diesels cost around twenty quid each and I soon had a collection running up and down a couple of boards that I had knocked up. No scenery, just four lines of track with a few points. I also started collecting Hornby steam outline trains and built up a small stable of locos and wagons.
Then followed the first of several abortive attempts to build a 009 narrow gauge layout. My main narrow gauge interest was the various Welsh lines and I invented the Porthemrys and Llanowain Tramway. I built the baseboard, laid the track, started the ground- work, began building loco and rolling stock kits and then kind of ran out of steam.
In 1989 I decided that I wanted to get involved with a club. Attending various model railway exhibitions as a punter I had seen Tony Rogers exhibiting his minimal American layout Black Frog Creek, and I had also had a chat with Phil Clark at one of the AMRG exhibitions. Finally I came to the club's open day in September 1992 and met the Joels and David Cole who invited me to start attending club nights.
At first I have to admit that I felt like a spare usher at a wedding, not having any great knowledge of railway history or modelling. My confidence grew when I started helping Tony Rogers to exhibit Black Frog Creek. Eventually the five members of the American Section started planning and building Pine Bluffs and I got involved in that at the expense of my narrow gauge interests.
The next attempt at a narrow gauge layout was St Etienne, inspired by a Mary Hopkin song (The Fields of St Etienne), and depicting a British Army narrow gauge depot in France in the First World War. That got as far as the basic bare baseboard! Then I planned a smaller version of Porthemrys using the St Etienne baseboard and this latter layout looked to be the likeliest to be completed sometime in the future. Except that I have started two small boards that are intended to end up as an HOn30 American narrow gauge mining line in 1930s Colorado. At the back of my mind I keep playing around with the idea of doing a fictitious British standard gauge layout based on the Weston, Clevedon and Portishead Railway, with elements of the Wantage Tramway and the Wisbech and Upwell. Then of course I do also have a fascination for industrial railways, such as those that ran on National Coal Board sites.
The problem is that when we attend exhibitions with Pine Bluffs I can't help being seduced by the different layouts on display and I find it very difficult to stick to one interest. What's more I still like aircraft, but I am not planning any trips to Greece!
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Section Members
Meet the men behind the legend - the members of the AMRG American section
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Danger: Men at Work
The section work on many things at once - find out whats going on at the moment
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Alton Limited
The section runs an all american meet in july every year
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