Hi gang -
Following some interesting posts in "Modelling Matters" about trench railways and the 1914-18 war, I thought it might be an idea to start a thread here.
Although most trench railways were 2ft (or metric equivalent) gauge which would take them outside the realm of 15 inch prototypes, there were some references to smaller gauges being used in tunnelling.
So to kick things off - my interest in this conflict has sort of rumbled under the surface for a number of years since finding my grandfather's service medals - the 1914 Star, British War Medal, and the Victory Medal - known colloquially as "Pip, Squeak, and Wilfred"!
He served in the Royal Artillery on 18pdr field-guns on the Somme and latterly in Italy although I have no details of his experiences since he refused to discuss them. I was able to find LAST WEEK on-line copies of his military service record which shows when and where he joined up voluntarily in 1914, a couple of stays in hospital, and then his move to Italy - which I never knew about until I read the service record!
I have a couple of books on WWI (which seem to be as scarce as hen's teeth over here....) including some on trench railways. Some time ago I had even considered building a small layout based on the British/Canadian railways using 1:32 scale models from Scale Link (and even got so far as buying a kit for a WWI Mk IV tank!) but then discovered that there were no reasonably-priced models of soldiers except for the Scale Link ones at 8 Pounds 50p each! Changing scale to, say, 7mm also caused problems since I couldn't then find any vehicles...
Anyway, with the Moderator's permission I'll leave this thread open for any discussions on this subject.