From BBC News
A man has been airlifted to hospital after being crushed and trapped by a model train in his back garden.
The man, in his 70s, was thought to have been sitting on the large- scale locomotive when it left the rails and came off a garden wall.
He was trapped for almost 30 minutes as ambulance crews and firefighters tried to free him at his home in Wilmcote in Warwickshire, paramedics said.
He suffered abdominal and pelvic injuries, they added.
Looked serious. :(
Yebbut what was the number of the train??
And will RAIB be involved???
(Hope he recovers soon..)
And this sounds more like a miniature train than a model one.
Is there a definite demarcation point? . A rough guide might be whether you can actually ride in the train or sit on it like on a motorbike and a lot would depend if it was a scale model of a standard gauge loco or a narrow gauge or a freelance design. On the smaller common model engineering gauges under 5" I would think ride in would be rare and usually a trolley on a raised track is what is used. Surprising how heavy even something on 3" gauge can be.
One of the teachers I mentioned in another post got the model building bug and rapidly went from OO , gauge 1 to a freelance "narrow gauge" live steam on 5" gauge. Purchased a partly built loco and finished it. He nearly didn't as eager to play with it after getting to the steam stage did a test run on the length of track he had laid. At that time the brake wasn't finished and he thought he could stop by putting his foot out,completely underestimating the effort needed to stop something that was getting on for 2cwt. That didn't kill him but his wife after seeing the damage to her flowerbeds nearly did. Having a Loco that weighty would be bad enough but if it is a steamer then there may well be burns from burning coal and steam as well.
G.Harman
Only in the uk.rail newsgroups...
:-)
Even the house picture is wrong on that article ... perhaps the real owner of THAT house could be sue them ;)
The gentleman's name is Richard Periam and from the aerial images it's difficult to ell the gauge or format :( Although he only lives 20 miles away I do not know him, so can anybody else fill in some more detail. It would be nice to know how he is doing rather than just incorrectly augmented repeats of the original BBC report.
At least the Stratford local paper labels their picture "a model train" suggesting it also a library picture but it seems to be a slightly larger one than the Mail.
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