The brainchild of our Patron, internationally renowned actor and performer Eddie Izzard, the Bexhill 1940 Winter Wartime Model Railway is the centrepiece of our new Bexhill in WWII gallery – and the second to join the museum’s collection.
Lovingly built by Bexhill Museum’s own team of model railway enthusiasts to Eddie’s design, both layouts feature a score of well-known historic Bexhill and Sidley landmarks, some still with us, others long gone
As seen on TV
A Trackside View of the Winter Wartime Model Railway
From the More4 favourite show Little Trains & Big Names with Pete Waterman
Stream on Channel Four and watch the whole show here: Little Trains & Big Names with Pete Waterman
The Winter Wartime Model Railway: Eddie Izzard talks to Lucy Cotter of Sky News.
Eddie’s father, John Izzard, was evacuated from Bexhill at the outbreak of World War II aged just 12. He returned during the winter of 1940 to find the town blanketed in snow. Decades later Eddie paid tribute to John's wartime experience by designing and funding a marvellous re-creation of Bexhill as it was at that time.
The N-gauge model even shows John, who sadly died before he could see the finished work, as the home-coming evacuee schoolboy outside the family home, 1 Laburnum Cottages, Ninfield Road, Sidley.
Two years of work have since gone into the project with more modelling to recreate the town's seafront anti-invasion defences in 1940. The model includes landmarks such as the Town Hall, Bexhill Hospital, and Bexhill West station, later cut off from the national rail network on the recommendation of the 1963 Beeching Report.
Long lost landmarks like the Egerton Park Lido and the Metropole Hotel are recreated, and there is a working model of Hoad’s Mill, a famous painting of which by L.S. Lowry now hangs in the Musuem’s Sargent Gallery. Visitors are given a presentation about the railway by one of our volunteers, covering all the fine details of this painstaking work.
Building Bexhill to scale: How it was done
A Model World: The history of the Izzard Family Railway and the Bexhill Winter Wartime Railway.
How a team of volunteers raced to set them up for public display.
© Hornby: A Model World clip courtesy of UKTV Media Limited.
More videos of the Winter Wartime Model Railway
