'My grandchildren love it': Lincoln model railway keeps growing

When Paul Penning was gifted a train set as a boy, he was instantly hooked. Now many years down the track, he’s been able to reconnect with the hobby.

The 74-year-old has spent the past five years making miniatures of buildings for his model railway, including several scale replicas of Selwyn structures.

"My grandfather gave me a model railway for my birthday when I was very young and I had a model railway to about the time I went to high school. Then, of course, life got in the way," Paul said.

"My grandchildren love it now."

His collection of scale replicas includes The Famous Grouse Hotel, Lincoln Library, the former Lincoln Railway Station and Prebbleton goods shed, Lincoln Union Church and, most recently, Coffee Culture.

Paul is a retired aircraft engineer, who worked for National Airways Corporation, Mt Cook Airlines and Air New Zealand.

He said of building the miniatures: “I just enjoy making them. I enjoyed the challenge of designing them on the computer. Since retirement, I’ve taught myself two computer programs, one to work a 3D printer and one to work a Cricut, which is a poor man’s laser cutter. And I make the models from those."

The 3D printer was a birthday present from his children, and his wife bought the Cricut.

"As part of my career I’d seen 3D printing being done and I thought actually I could use this for model making.

"So my three children built houses and they asked me to make models of their houses, so they could see.

"So I started doing that and then when we were building this house here in Lincoln, I built a model of that, and it’s just gone on from there."

He built the model of Coffee Culture because his granddaughter worked there, but generally, it’s just buildings he finds interesting.

"The combined Presbyterian church I thought was a great looking building, the Grouse I thought again it’s good looking, interesting architecture, and the same for the library."

Now he has a running N-gauge layout (1:160 scale), which includes buildings such as the Grouse. 

Paul’s goal is not to replicate every detail of Lincoln, but rather to follow a general New Zealand theme featuring buildings from the district.

"They’ll go creatively in their own spaces, I don’t want to be too realistic about it, otherwise you get yourself into a bind."

He is constantly thinking about what to build.

An OO-gauge layout (1:76 scale), with structures such as the library, is next on his list.

"Lying in bed last night, I thought I need to build another railway layout so I can run a lot of the models of trains and locomotives that I’ve built.

"So maybe that will be the next thing I do. Though because of the fire in the Port Hills, I wondered about doing the Lincoln Fire Station."

Paul recently took his model of the library to the library.

"They were quite interested. I was sort of surprised. They wanted to put it on their Facebook page. There’s been quite a bit of response to that."

-By Daniel Alvey and Geoff Sloan
Made with the support of NZ On Air