About me

Hello! My name is Brian Wright. I was born in Glasgow on 19^th February 1935; my father was the assistant manager of Bryant & May’s match factory in Glasgow ("Empire Works" in Shuna Street, Maryhill); although he was descended from Scottish roots, he was actually born in Liverpool; my mother was born in Bristol, the seventh child of a seventh child (but not having second sight!); her father was in the tobacco industry.

I am the second of five brothers; my elder brother, Geoffrey, is the proprietor of M.W. Models, a.k.a. "Everything Meccano" in Henley-on-Thames, which, I believe, is the only retail shop in the world specialising purely in Meccano. (but see paragraph on my "News" page)

I am married to Margaret, who has recently retired from her career as a P.E. teacher, and we have two sons, Nick (b. 1974) who is married to Kate (recently qualified as a Chartered Accountant) and is a Commissioning Editor for a publishing company, and Mark (b. 1976) who has obtained a place at Oxford Brookes University from September 2005, to study Construction Management.

I retired from banking in 1994, and live in Abingdon, where I worked for the last twenty-two years of my bank career.

I have been a life-long transport enthusiast, with a particular love of steam railways. One of my very earliest memories is, as a child of three, watching a blue streamlined train on the 0-gauge layout in the British Railways pavilion at the Glasgow Empire Exhibition in Bellahouston Park in 1938. I am afraid I cannot be certain after the lapse of time whether it was the L.N.E.R. "Coronation" or the L.M.S. "Coronation Scot"; all I am certain of was that it was blue! I am also very fond of vintage buses, particularly pre-war Leylands and, of those, especially those belonging to Alexander's in Scotland.

During the early post-war years, I was an avid train-spotter, particularly on the platforms of Glasgow Central station, where I acquired my great love of the Stanier "Pacifics" of the old L.M.S. In my later boyhood I attended a school in Oxford, where the G.W.R. and L.M.S. lines ran parallel along the bottom of the school playing fields - while all the other boys were playing rugby one way, I was watching the trains in the other!

I have, to a greater or lesser extent, been a collector of old toys, especially tinplate trains, for most of my life.

For various periods in the 1950s I helped, either on a casual, part-time or full-time basis, in Ted Morris’s model shop ("E.A.M.E.S.") in Reading, and used to handle a good many interesting second-hand items, some of which I purchased and still retain in my collection.

I am a member of several railway societies, real and miniature, notably the Great Western Society, the Gresley Society, the Sir Nigel Gresley Locomotive Preservation Trust, the Hornby Railway Collectors’ Association, the Bassett-Lowke Society and the Train Collectors' Society. Among my other hobbies I count model engineering, photography, choral singing, foreign travel and driving classic motor-cars.