He bounded back with a twinkle of pure joy in his eyes. The gang were gathered round the school canteen table with their new purchases.
One examined his with the utmost care, holding it only at the edges as he drew it right up to his spectacles. Another daren’t remove his from its plastic bag – folding it up and slipping it gingerly into his breast pocket for safety.

“Look at this. 18.2mm EM gauge, perfect,” he said as he sat down to join his pals. In his hand, a metre length of model railway track.

A ripple of envy ran through the others as they looked up from their metal sprues of miniature carriage windows and 4mm to the foot model lamp-posts. "Now take a look at these.”

They shared their finds with pride, with all the quivering excitement a school pupil might show for a rare football sticker or limited edition Pokemon card.
Except these were grown men, most if not all beyond retirement age, a cacophony of bushy beards, glasses on cords, elasticated slacks and comfort brogues.

More men just like them (with a shared taste in knitwear it seemed) filled Parmiter's School over the weekend, drawn from far and wide to the highlight of the modelling buff's calendar – The Watford Finescale Show 2013.

The sound of steam and whistles filled the exhibition, each room filled with exquisitely detailed dioramas. In one a 1:148 scale recreation of a Devonshire town in the 1930s complete with staple-sized lovers waving farewell on the platform, in another a 35ft long model of Liverpool Lime Street station circa 1945, in another, a table-top quarry complete with working crane crafted from original scale drawings.

Tucked inbetween, stalls offered every part and missing component imaginable – scale signals, stickers, spoked wheels, sprung buffers and scenery too, from cut-cardboard churches to bespoke hand-crafted trees.

They squeezed round each of the layouts, noses scrunched, chins forward, inspecting each speck-sized nut and bolt on the Lilliputian locomotives. They spoke of historical accuracy, wiring plans, couplings and exactly what year that livery was given to that particular engine.

And as I stood there with them, watching a tiny freight train (an ex-LSW Beattie 2-4-0 WT apparently) pull through a fictional station, I couldn’t help feeling, well, profoundly jealous.

These men (and save for the odd long-suffering dragged-around wife they were almost exclusively male), had worked all their lives, many as engineers and electricians, many more as builders, executives or salesmen, and on receiving their hard-earned gold watch or carriage clock found huge gaping holes in their day-to-day schedules.

With weekends devoid of other plans stretching out ahead of them they’d found new pleasure in their now ample leisure time to indulge in childhood passions for miniature models.

One told me he’d joined the Watford & District Model Railway Club as soon as he started drawing his pension – a perfect excuse to while away hours in the garden shed, away from the drone of daytime TV and the nagging wife.

I fear I’ll be afforded no such luxury.

The number of people working past state pension age has nearly doubled in the past 20 or so years and things are getting worse. Thanks to medical advances my generation will no doubt live even longer with even less money to survive on, in a more expensive world. There will be more of us, one in four people will be older than 65 by 2033, with more bills to pay, and that's after paying off crippling student loans and never-ending mortgages.

If there are any jobs going for geriatrics by then, will any of us ever be able to afford to leave them? We’ll be struggling to feed ourselves and stay warm – let alone shell out for a scale signal box at £30 a piece.

It's easy to scoff at these rather eccentric enthusiasts, but at least they’ve got a hobby. I worry the only thing on a tiny scale I’ll have in my senior years will be my bank balance.

* * *

THE MEN and their machines turned up on Saturday night. The following morning they tore up the old road. That afternoon they laid a new one and by the evening they were gone.

A resurfaced Queens Road, laid in a day. That's an entirely resurfaced road in the time it takes a chicken to lay an egg.

It was impressive, as far as roadworks can be impressive. Well-planned and swiftly-executed – why can't all roadworks be that way?

Meanwhile, down the road at Watford Junction the ground remains torn up, the whole thing wrapped up in ugly metal railings while diggers sit there unmoving. What’s taking them so long?

It's no doubt a more complex job, but progress has been at a snail's pace. Taxi drivers tell me labourers at the site are few and far between.
It’s dangerous.

Pedestrians are forced to dodge between cars to get to the station entrance, bus passengers are dropped off in the middle of moving traffic, the resulting traffic jams are making everyone’s lives a misery and walking near there after dark is a genuine risk. After breaking something that wasn't broken, when are London Midland going to bother getting round to fixing it again?

I spoke to a retired gentlemen while waiting for a bus at a not-so-temporary stop at the station.

“We’d have had this done in a few days,” he rather boldly claimed.
In his day, he would wake up before dawn and head to Camberwell Green, waiting for lorries that would pick him and others gathered there up for a day's work laying roads.

It was well paid and he worked hard. “These lot aren't bothered.
“It’s not in their interests to get the work done. It’s a complete mess.
“They're making a mockery of all of us.”

@georgepnott