Photo: Steve Crise / Railway Modeller
You’d think a successful music career spanning decades, life in the limelight and a handful of kids would keep any man from having a spare second, but you don’t know Sir Rod Stewart.
As it turns out, neither did anybody else. The musician caused quite a stir with his exclusive interview with Railway Modeller magazine, in which he revealed that he had been working on a massive model railway city for the past 26 years. Apparently, he did most of the work on it while on tour, toiling away the idle times before a show. It beats doing drugs and partying like a rock star ahead of shows.
Stewart calls the project Grand Street and Three Rivers City, which is inspired, first and foremost, by the view he had from his window as a kid, to the railway tracks. His second source of inspiration was ‘40s New York City and Chicago, and he made painstaking efforts to keep his model as close to reality as possible.
Speaking to the publication, Stewart says that his passion was landscape and not necessarily the trains and tracks. As you can see in the gallery attached, he also made sure he lined the streets with cars and trucks, and even put up billboards on city buildings.
As soon as photos of his model were released online, Jeremy Vine went on his BBC Radio 2 show and said that he had trouble believing Stewart actually put the thing together. This prompted a call from Stewart himself, in which he offered more specifics, including how the only thing he didn’t do on the model was the wiring, the electric part.
He also explained how he sought everything to be perfect, down to the bricks that paved the streets.
“You start off with a gray. And then you add a little concrete color, so every paving stone is slightly different,” Stewart told Vine. “And the cracks have to have some black chalk... and then you add a little bit of rubbish in the gutters, you add a little bit of rust here and there. I enjoyed the building more than I did the running.”
Everything has sounds, too. You can hear the trains go through the city, there is a “city sound of New York,” and you can listen to the birds chirping in more isolated areas.
The musician considers the model completed. He may upgrade one or two buildings in the future, but he doesn’t want to add anything to it. At 124 feet long and 23 feet wide, it’s large enough – so large that he can’t even consider moving it to the UK, from the special room in his LA mansion.
Stewart calls the project Grand Street and Three Rivers City, which is inspired, first and foremost, by the view he had from his window as a kid, to the railway tracks. His second source of inspiration was ‘40s New York City and Chicago, and he made painstaking efforts to keep his model as close to reality as possible.
Speaking to the publication, Stewart says that his passion was landscape and not necessarily the trains and tracks. As you can see in the gallery attached, he also made sure he lined the streets with cars and trucks, and even put up billboards on city buildings.
As soon as photos of his model were released online, Jeremy Vine went on his BBC Radio 2 show and said that he had trouble believing Stewart actually put the thing together. This prompted a call from Stewart himself, in which he offered more specifics, including how the only thing he didn’t do on the model was the wiring, the electric part.
He also explained how he sought everything to be perfect, down to the bricks that paved the streets.
“You start off with a gray. And then you add a little concrete color, so every paving stone is slightly different,” Stewart told Vine. “And the cracks have to have some black chalk... and then you add a little bit of rubbish in the gutters, you add a little bit of rust here and there. I enjoyed the building more than I did the running.”
Everything has sounds, too. You can hear the trains go through the city, there is a “city sound of New York,” and you can listen to the birds chirping in more isolated areas.
The musician considers the model completed. He may upgrade one or two buildings in the future, but he doesn’t want to add anything to it. At 124 feet long and 23 feet wide, it’s large enough – so large that he can’t even consider moving it to the UK, from the special room in his LA mansion.
Google News