Ancient Web: Dave McCarthy Recorded Tri-ang Model Trains from a 1999 Website

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Dave McCarthy's childhood train set went into the loft. Years later, the Tri-ang model-railway obsession returned, and this time he had a computer and enough enthusiasm to document almost the entire product range.

Visit the Tri-ang Railways archive.

McCarthy dates his first website to March 1999. Its focus is the British Tri-ang range produced by Lines Brothers from 1950 to 1965, including the affordable train sets that introduced many children to model railroading.

Unlike sites that replace their old introductions with modern promotional copy, McCarthy left his 1999, 2003, 2008, and 2011 reflections together. They document both the growth of the collection and the changing technical limits of putting photographs online.

Twenty-eight thousand files and the dial-up problem

In his 2003 introduction McCarthy estimated more than 1,700 pages and 6,000 pictures. By 2011 he said the collection had grown to over 28,000 files, taking up more than 500 megabytes. Those are historical figures supplied by the webmaster, not a fresh audit of the server.

The site divides the trains into Tri-ang OO, TT, Big Big Trains, and Minic Motorways. A secondary entrance leads to subject pages and exhibits. Photographs document models and variations that are easy to confuse without seeing a specimen.

McCarthy remembers the Christmas 1960 Princess train set that started his interest. Later, Pat Hammond's reference book sent him back to swap meets and prompted him to reconstruct an authentic shop-display layout. He scanned old printed material, photographed other collectors' pieces, and credited people who contributed images or corrected details.

His discussion of file size is a perfect piece of web history. Large scans were reduced to tiny images because readers on telephone modems could not reasonably wait for multi-megabyte photographs. The webmaster eventually judged the archive too large to rebuild entirely with modern resolution.

The project was explicitly noncommercial, although it depended on help from another collector, Derek Gardner, who supplied hosting. That relationship, preserved in the site's thank-you notes, helps explain its survival.

The hobby's history and the website's history run together here: a child with a toy train became a collector with a scanner, then a curator of a large independent technical catalog.

Read McCarthy's preserved site introductions and explore its interior index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.