No. 168 GWR - the Great Way Round – the concept.
The past couple of years have seen a number of exciting modifications to the railway that have so far passed unrecorded. I was first alerted to the misuse of the initials GWR by George Behrend (Ref 1)1 in his 1966 book G one W ith R egret. In his recollections of the G reat W estern R ailway he extols the virtues of G od’s W onderful R ailway and notes that opponents of GW methods would dismiss the company as the G reat W ay R ound. (Something about Brunel’s original route to Bath and Bristol via Didcot and Swindon not being convenient for reaching Plymouth or Penzance.) In the 1950s the Reverend Awdry’s railway books were almost compulsory reading for children, well probably just boys. However there was another model railway cleric, the Scottish Presbyterian Minister the Reverend Edward Beal (Ref 2). He wrote and published a series of modelling guides later to be bound as a compendium and published as ‘West Midland, a Railway in Miniature / aka the ‘00’ Gauge Layout of a Lif