{"id":30903,"date":"2015-04-04T04:00:40","date_gmt":"2015-04-04T08:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30903"},"modified":"2015-04-03T10:12:10","modified_gmt":"2015-04-03T14:12:10","slug":"pete-watermans-1-million-model-railway-collection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/04\/04\/pete-watermans-1-million-model-railway-collection\/","title":{"rendered":"Pete Waterman’s \u00a31 million model railway collection"},"content":{"rendered":"

Model railways can get expensive, but they don’t normally get into seven figures<\/a> (and that’s approximately one-tenth of the total value):<\/p>\n

Pete Waterman\u2019s indelible links with pop empires and reality television overlook the personal vocal abilities of the mogul himself. In the late 1960s, when his infatuation with trains and their miniature replicas began, he funded his acquisitions by starting the flying choir — a venture in which his singing entertained wedding-goers at different churches across Coventry on Saturdays, earning 10\/6 a time.<\/p>\n

A guinea a week from his paper round and \u201cfive bob\u201d from fetching coal in his sister\u2019s pram also helped him replicate the sights he would witness from the tracks stretching past his childhood home. “When you live in a council house and these things go past your door, it\u2019s your first encounter with beauty,\u201d recalls the man whose collection, according to auctioneers Dreweatts, is of \u201cincalculable\u201d value 56 years in.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were people sitting with white tablecloths and table lamps having dinner. It was magical. Think of the contrast: we didn’t even have glass in the windows at home.<\/p>\n

\u201cI set out to create the best, and I have done for railways what some people have done for model cars and planes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Waterman is about to put \u00a31 million of his scratch-built model trains under the hammer in Mayfair. It\u2019s only a tenth of the full collection, but selling the live steam and 10mm to foot-scale models will raise enough to safeguard his full-size steam engines, held around the country under the direction of the Waterman Railway Heritage Trust.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese full-size engines won’t be back in steam for ten years,\u201d he admits. \u201cI\u2019m 68 now and this is probably the last chance I will have to restore the engines held by the trust. So I’m making sure there is enough money in ten years\u2019 time to continue the job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides, he feels the artefacts going on sale are somewhat anomalistic. \u201cThey no longer fit into the wider collection. It\u2019s almost like I was into Pre-Raphaelite art and I’m now a modernist.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Model railways can get expensive, but they don’t normally get into seven figures (and that’s approximately one-tenth of the total value): Pete Waterman\u2019s indelible links with pop empires and reality television overlook the personal vocal abilities of the mogul himself. In the late 1960s, when his infatuation with trains and their miniature replicas began, he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,28,237],"tags":[951,200],"class_list":["post-30903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-media","category-railways","tag-modeltrains","tag-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-82r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30903"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30905,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30903\/revisions\/30905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}