Tri-ang Railways, with actual insulating-wire cables.
My fascination with cable drums goes back to our train set, one of those magical events which only happen a few times in a lifetime, and which are as good as any previous daydream fantasies about them.
Mum was not treated well by Dad, not mentally, not physically, and not financially, in an era when the man owned everything, the wife was supposed to stay at home, the Police would shrug and mutter "domestic", and the husband's income was supposed to provide housekeeping. Consequently all our big toys tended to come from sacrifice, auction, or our father's occasional largesse.
Those odd Christmases when he would turn up from some foreign unaccompanied posting with two identical Lego sets, or two Action Man vehicles . . . one year it was two Chemistry sets, I got Lott's, my brother the larger Merit set, and we spent the next few years occasionally trying to gas or kill each other, ourselves, or just burn the house down with methylated spirits!
Colour variations.
So Mum would scrimp and save for the things she thought we needed, or wanted to get us, and we had hand-me-downs from other kids in the village. The Church fete was a standard for toys, and we never had a new bike, they would come from the auctions, get stripped-down and rebuilt, sometimes painted post-office red, and when Mum had a bit of spare cash a deal would be made of going to the cycle shop in Fleet and getting a pair of Ever Ready cycle 'lamps', or a little tool kit, which hung from the back of the saddle!
Merit Cable Laying Party.
And don't think this is a sob-story, I can't fault my childhood, it was privileged and vaguely middle-class, albeit, with Mum jumping through hoops in the background, which I wouldn't understand or appreciate, until much later.
Merit Cable Drums (one open, one closed)
One year, when we were about 7/8, we came down to breakfast (after waking at about 2 a.m. and devouring our Christmas stockings), to find the summer table cloth over the dining table, where Christmas dinner would later be held, but it was clear the dinning table was A) rather lumpy, and B) seemed to have slightly larger dimensions than it had had the night before.
Wardie Matermodels.
The open one is made of resinated card.
After breakfast we were directed to a large parcel which had appeared under the tree overnight, which was labelled to both of us, and instructed to attack the wrapping-paper from both ends simultaneously, which we did, to reveal a large, homemade wooden box, inside of which was a complete, second-hand model railway collection, with a couple of Locomotives, various items of rolling stock, and a small corrugated cardboard box of various Airfix, Tri-Ang and Merit accessories, passengers, cargo etc.
There was an old die-cast level-crossing, some signals, platform sections (not enough for a complete station, but enough for imagination!), all sorts, a lead water tower, I can't remember it all now, and it would get added-to, over the years. But one of the wagons was the Triang-Hornby cable drum flat, with the two green drums, and, in little presents hidden on the tree over the next few days, was revealed the Merit Station Staff with barrow, and the Cable Party with the red cable drum.
Trix TT-gauge.
Image - Vectis Auctions, I think!
The load can be transferred to an OO flat car or bogie well-wagon!
Mum had bought a whole train set, from the - now long gone - Pearsons Auctions in Fleet, and under the table cloth, was a chip-board layout, painted with roads, a pond, fields etc . . . in household gloss paint, the pond was just a bright blue blob, but, it had a figure-8, inside a large oval, with sidings, and was the best thing we'd ever seen!
Kibri, real wire?
An old Hammant & Morgan transformer was wired-up and plugged in and after a certain amount of sanding the track, and oiling points, it worked! We played with it until mid-afternoon, and when the smell of dinner started to warm the house, so we had to put it away, slide the board down the hallway wall, and wait until Boxing day to have another go!
Roco International.
Obviously cable-laying, and the delivery of cables, became a regular feature of the railway, which ened-up fixed to the joists in the attic! And I've never got cable-drums out of my system. There's an Eldon cable truck or two, mentioned passim, and for Blogging another day, and various track-side drums from various sources, including the other Merit set, and over the years I've managed to get most version of Hornby, Tri-ang and Triang-Hornby flat cars with cable drums!
I guess it's also, that when we were kids, cable drums were literally everywhere. They filled lay-bys, pale pine, newly delivered ones, neatly stacked, rotting, collapsing piles of old gray carcases. they were all down the sides of the railways, men burned piles of empty one in fields, there were lorry-loads of them on every A-Road!
As we transitioned from Edwardian, horse-drawn Britain, to the 'white heat' of post-war technology, everyone needed cables, the railways, British Telecom/the Post Office, the National Grid was being established, street lighting, illuminated traffic island bollards, traffic lights and road signs, and there were even rumours of traffic control cables under the new M4, and it was all in your face!
Preiser, modern steel drums.
It's all still there, but it gets replaced or updated in small sections, from reusable sheet steel, or steel tube drums on trailers, it gets pulled though from a side street, rather than trench-dug the length of the High Street, so you're not so aware of it happening these days, and wooden drums have almost disappeared! As have the little stripey tents the workmen hid in on their endless tea-brakes!
And I really will try to get the rest of the HO-OO figure posts done this Christmas! It was going through those posts which lead me to this post! There's a follow-up post on the military train stuff too.
Aaaaannnnnnd, a few days later: 'Here's a military train, please readers, send me your train stuff before Hugh does any more', and only four days after 69 people were killed on a Spanish train? Tasteless. You can hear his brain not working from the other side of the country!
https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2026/10/the-trains-in-spain.html
