Northern iron

I'd read that the Summerlee Museum of Scottish Industrial Life was hosting a Meccano exhibition this weekend, so that seemed like a good opportunity to see what people had built.  I'd never been to the museum before: it's on the site of the former Summerlee Iron Works at Coatbridge.

It was touch and go whether I would actually go, because the weather forecast wasn't great, but also better than tomorrow, and I couldn't decide whether to belt across to Coatbridge on Fidra the Pan European, or cycle to Waverley and belt across to Coatbridge Sunnyside on the train.  It would take two hours door to door by bike and train, but less than one hour by motorbike.  So I got togged up, headed out, and immediately forgot to stop en route at the chemist for a prescription.

Foreboding grey skies and light rain notwithstanding, all was well until I reached the maze of slip roads combining old A8, new M8 and Eurocentral, and I lost my way several times ending up on the motorway back to Edinburgh.  Sound familiar?!  Eventually I found the right road and traffic jammed my way through Coatbridge to the museum.

It's a pretty impressive place.  The first stop was actually before I'd gone inside, because I wanted to see the ex-South African Railways Garratt steam locomotive.  It was built in 1956 by the NBR at Springburn, worked in SA, and came back to the UK in 1986.  It is huge, as all the big Garratts were.

Inside I wandered around, looking at all sorts of things.  The museum has a lot of social history items, everything from dentist's tools to handcuffs to a lovely old BSA 250cc motorbike that some random person commuted to work on.

What about the Meccano?  Ah yes, it was arranged along three long tables, and several builders were showing off some of their creations.  I say 'some', because everyone I talked to said their collections were either taking up an entire attic or had got out of hand completely.  A few had made models in every colour era, from the old silver pieces to red and green of the 1950s, to blue and yellow and black.  We had Goliath cranes with electric motors and LEDs, we had cantilever bridges, we had Hornby railway stations, two and three piston stationary engines with working valvegear, two models of Concorde, a rather good model of Sir Malcolm Campbell's last iteration of Bluebird, and an equally good model of a Spitfire aeroplane.  I also liked the cab of a Deltic diesel loco (bottom left).  The best one I thought was a fully working showman's engine (bottom right).  It was all terribly masculine, though, all very "a Meccano boy is the happiest boy in the world" sort of stuff.

After lunch I wandered around a bit more.  I enjoyed seeing the big – and splendidly Art Deco – Compton cinema organ, whose pedalboard has various buttons for sound effects like cymbal crashes, waves at the seashore, aeroplanes and so on.  I also enjoyed the exhibition of dozens of model boats, all made by one person, each a couple of feet long and finished to an extraordinary level of detail.

By this time I was overheating in my motorbike clothes and decided it was time to go home.  I somehow had no problems at all with my navigation this time and flew back along the motorway before the rain arrived.