The railway of the future (please wait while it restarts), by Rufus Tennant

An original contemporary review.

The promotional film for Railtopia promises ‘the world’s first living railway’. For about twenty seconds on Saturday morning, it delivered. A tiny express, its lamps glowing, slid out of a tunnel beneath a painted Alpine peak, crossed a viaduct no longer than my arm and stopped dead. A small sign lit up on the mountainside: ‘Signal fault. Our engineers are on their way.’ They were still on their way when we left, two and a half hours later.

Railtopia opened last month in a former cash-and-carry on the edge of Haddlecombe, and nobody could accuse it of modesty. Tickets cost £32 for adults and £24 for children, and the posters call it ‘the future of the model railway’. The idea is simple enough. Instead of simply watching trains go round, visitors are handed a pair of chunky goggles and an electronic controller called a ‘Driver’s Key’. The key is supposed to put you in charge of a locomotive, while the goggles fill the layout with animated passengers, weather and, according to the leaflet, ‘a sky that changes with your mood’.

My mood changed long before the sky did. My goggles had to be restarted four times in the first twenty minutes. When they did work, a cartoon guard waved at me from the platform at Little Orbury, then sank slowly through the station roof and vanished. My nine-year-old nephew, Ossian, was given a Driver’s Key that drove nothing. He pressed every button on it with the patient thoroughness of a safe-cracker, and the only thing that moved was a level crossing barrier, which went up and down, up and down, for the rest of the morning.

To be fair, the layout itself is beautiful. Someone has spent years on it. There are hand-painted cows in the fields, a working windmill, a harbour full of fishing boats no bigger than a fingernail and, in the corner of the market town, a tiny man forever chasing his hat down a hill. If Railtopia simply switched the trains on and let people look, it would be a very good afternoon out.

Instead, the technology gets in the way at every turn. The ‘Storm Experience’, advertised as the highlight of the visit, is a five-minute show in which thunder booms from the speakers, the lights flicker and a fine mist drifts over the Highland section. On our visit, the thunder worked perfectly. The lights stayed on. The mist was sprayed, with great enthusiasm, over the queue. A woman in front of me, peering through dripping glasses, said, ‘Well, at least something moved.’

The staff deserve medals. They were young, cheerful and run off their feet, sprinting between broken goggles with a box of spare batteries like medics on a battlefield. One of them confided that the system ‘doesn’t like Saturdays’. I sympathised. By then, neither did I.

I do not doubt the ambition behind Railtopia, or the money. But a model railway is one of the few pleasures that has always worked without a screen, a password or a software update. Railtopia has spent a fortune trying to improve it, and has succeeded mainly in stopping the trains.

On the way out, a touchscreen invited us to rate our visit from one to five stars. Ossian studied it for a long moment, then asked whether we ought to restart it first.

The visit to Railtopia is described as an expensive letdown. How does the writer try to show this?

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