A Train of Thought by Nigel Roth

It’s nineteen-twenty.

Along the avenues, Parisienne railway workers loiter, having struck against capitalism, and the damage they perceive it doing to their lives. Few trains are running in Paris, and people are forced to walk or cab around Georges-Eugène Haussmann's city.

But, in the workshop of Robert Marescot, they are running, and they’re about to exit a dark, dismal tunnel to change the world.

The world of model railways, that is, the one that counts.

Marescot, I venture, was fairly unique.

Because when other famous companies like Marklin and Hornby were creating model locomotives and coaches that resembled awkward rolling bricks of metal, his eye for style, accuracy, and scale was almost unique.

Today, we’d take our talent online and be crushed by the weight of those lying-in-wait to banish individuality and innovation, but back then, the same year the United States returned control of American railroads to the original railroad companies for them to develop, evolve, and flourish in their own way, Marescot did the only thing he could do.

He formed a company, and began crafting models with the right proportions.

Of course, other manufacturers would become the big guns of the Twenties and Thirties modelmaking scene, because they quickly worked out that the market consisted mainly of less demanding and educationally-lackluster consumers who delighted in watching a tinpot tinplate chunk plod around an ugly rounded rail steadied on odd metal plates, while whooping hooray or hourra or hurra, or just grunting.