A collection of model trains worth millions of dollars has been donated to the Workshops Rail Museum in Ipswich, Queensland by the estate of the late – and apparently, deeply weird – businessman Marsden Williams. The 11,000 hyper-detailed models make up only half of his entire collection. Hold on – it gets weirder.
Williams kept his model trains and 4.5km of scaled-down railway track in a specially constructed two-storey building called the T House, where they were tended by a technician and several staff for more than thirty years. The staff were forbidden to talk to outsiders about the trains, taking the whole reclusive-millionaire-train-collector thing right out of ‘charming eccentric’ territory and into the ‘possible megalomaniac with train-shaped plans for world domination’ zone.
Now that Williams has passed on to that big railway modellers convention in the sky (and the world has escaped an abominable fate???) the Ipswich museum has the unenviable task of cleaning, photographing, cataloguing and displaying the thousands of toys they are NOT toys.
Not that they seem upset about the monumental task ahead of them – despite estimates that it will take about 40 years to get it done (yeah, literally 40 years), Workshops collection manager Rob Shiels seems positively giddy to be working with such cool toys THEY’RE NOT TOYS.
“Inside the cabins are painted, there’s moving parts … and there’s very, very high quality motors,” he gushed to the ABC, sounding not at all like a man finally living out his childhood fantasies.
“Other models have light switches that’ll turn the lights on these models, so when they’re on the layout and drawing power you can turn switches so lights will come on. There’s sound effects as well … and also some of them will blow smoke.”
For the rest of us casual tiny-trainspotters, we’ll have to wait until the museum gets the displays up and running to cop a good look. And until then, we can but dream of one day, having our very own giant, secret model train bunker, where we can while away our days looking down on those tiny locomotives like the gods we’re meant to be…
Oh.
Source: ABC.
Image: ITV.
