EP 09 · July 7, 2026 · 0:51
Kingdom of the Model Railway
with Wilf Adeyemi
Twenty-two years, 1:76 scale, a working timetable — and the strike that stopped the whole layout for eleven scale days.
0:000:51
Cold open: an empire in a barn
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Transcript
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Mara
This is Room Tone. I'm Mara Voss. Episode nine: Kingdom of the Model Railway. In a barn outside town, Wilf Adeyemi has spent twenty-two years building a railway empire at one seventy-sixth scale, timetabled to the minute, with a working post office and a strike that lasted, in scale time, eleven days.
Wilf
It is not a train set. A train set goes in circles. This is a working railway that happens to be small. Every wagon has a destination and a reason. If the six-forty runs late, somewhere on the layout a tiny factory misses its coal.
Mara
You gave your own railway a labor dispute?
Wilf
The signalmen wanted a tea hut. I had painted the yard before I could afford to detail the interiors, you see.
Wilf
So I ran a slow service for eleven scale days, and then I built them their hut. It is the best building on the layout.
Mara
Twenty-two years. Was there a plan at the start?
Wilf
There was a junction. That is all a railway needs to become an argument with yourself. One junction implies two destinations, two destinations imply industry, industry implies people. My wife says I didn't build a railway, I incorporated a small nation.
Mara
The timetable runs to real minutes. What happens when you get it wrong?
Wilf
The same thing that happens on the real thing: everything downstream inherits your mistake. I once mislaid a cattle wagon for three months. When it turned up behind the paint shop I gave it a welcome-home run, empty, flags on the buffer beam.
Mara
Does anyone else ever get to drive?
Wilf
Second Saturdays. Four operators, headsets, proper block working. Grown adults asking permission to enter a section of track in a barn in a field. It is the most orderly place in the county, and I include the church.