Eddie Izzard's 1940 Winter Wartime Model Railway at Bexhill Museum in East Sussex

SussexWorld

Modellers at Bexhill Museum have given the 1940 Winter Wartime Model Railway a revamp during the annual three-week closure in January. The “old” Old Town was removed and replaced with a more accurate model of the buildings.

Transcript

00:00 The model itself is really, Eddie Izzard wanted this for his father as a 90th birthday present,

00:10 but unfortunately his father passed away before we could achieve, before we can complete this.

00:15 But Eddie is, has really been sponsoring this layout and he's quite happy with what we have

00:23 done. But there are several changes when Eddie visits us, because he quite often needs changes

00:28 all the time. When we originally built the layout, we were in a bit of a rush and we didn't really

00:34 build an old town, we just built, put some buildings in there. But we decided that we

00:41 had to have the old town, so this is, this is the new layout area here, which is basically

00:48 a representation of the old town and it's taken us a year to build. And I think that Eddie,

00:57 as you can see here, Eddie Izzard wanted quite a lot of buildings in here, especially over here,

01:02 which we, which we've got to put in the Grange, which Eddie requested. And a colleague of mine,

01:09 Stuart Pemberton, has built this and we should have us in here within the next couple of weeks.

01:15 And all of the buildings have got, are lit up. Some people may say, well, it's during the war,

01:22 why should you have lights in? But we've just put the lights in as, as the end of the war,

01:27 we put the lights on and say hurrah, the war's over. So that's basically it. We started this

01:33 model in 2018 and originally it was much smaller. It was six by 16. Eddie wanted to make it larger,

01:42 now seven by 17, which is quite a large end gauge layout. And this is a representation,

01:49 it's not an exact model, it's a representation of Bexhill during the 1940s. It's specially aimed

01:57 at 1940. So it's, it's, it's, it's what Eddie wanted. And we have taken it painstaking,

02:06 trying to build this, because we sometimes we have a bit of a rush because we have to have

02:11 completion dates for the museum to open, et cetera. But I think we've done a wonderful job

02:15 and we've had a few people help us out, especially a guy called Steve Chatfield,

02:22 Stuart Pemberton, Roy Blackmore and Colin Bennett have been the main helpers on this layout.

02:30 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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