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This is a list of model railways.
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The world's first model railway was made for the son of Emperor Napoleon III in 1859 at the Château de Saint-Cloud.However, "There is a strong possibility that Matthew Murray, who built the geared-for-safety rack engines for John Blenkinsop's coal mine near Leeds, England, was actually the first man ever to make a model locomotive." (Guy R. Williams, "The World of Model Trains," Andre Deutsch, London 1970.
List
UK and Ireland
A theme through many of these has been a movement away from the 'mass of moving trains' approach to a more pictorial approach, producing scenes and dioramas that represented the appearance of their original prototype.
Many of these standard gauge railways avoided the compromise of 00 gauge in favour of finescale standards such as EM and P4. Others modelled the narrow gauge. In both cases, a lack of ready to run rolling stock was not a drawback to an approach already based largely on scratchbuilding anyway, for quality reasons.