My full name is Michael Watts and I was born in 1936 in Mitcham, Surrey, England. Except for a few brief months during WWII, when our family was evacuated to Worplesdon, Surrey, I spent the first 30 years of my life living in Mitcham. From 1955 to 1957 I did my two years National Service in the RAF but spent most of the time near Chippenham in Wiltshire.

In 1967, after working for 7 years for one of the major banks, I decided to come to Canada. I settled in Toronto and married in 1969. From Toronto we moved to the new suburb of Ajax, just 25km or so east of downtown Toronto. We have lived here since. Our two children were born in Ajax, in 1972 and 1975, but have now moved on to go their own separate ways. I retired in 1999, after a lifetime in financial services businesses, primarily banking.

Since I was a young child, I have always been interested in trains and this hobby has now been with me for close to sixty years. For much of that time my hobby has included model trains, something that now I am retired, takes up a fair amount of my time. But, my wife, Carol, and I, have been able to travel as much as we can, and have had two long trips in Australia and New Zealand in recent years. I like gardening and I have a strong interest in old (pre-20th century) architecture, particularly in Britain. I have also a strong liking for classical music.

Gardening in Canada is a challenge! The winters are cold, sometimes very cold, and the summers are hot, sometimes very hot. Although temperatures tend to moderate each year by the middle of March, nights are still cold and our gardens don't really start to be active until late in May. June is the month when plants are growing most vigorously and most perennials are at their best at the end of June and in early July. From July onwards many annuals are flowering well and if watered well and protected will last until the Autumn. By the third week of September there are a few stragglers left in the flower garden and winter is just around the corner.

My interest in gardening is inherited. My father worked in the business all his working life. In his early years, he was in the market garden and horticultural business, but in later life he worked independently as a landscape gardener. His own garden at our home in Mitcham was always meticulously kept, with his small rose garden his pride.

Our climate here is not kind to roses and I struggle each year with them. Each winter usually I lose one or two plants, out of my 10 or so. The location of my garden is part of the problem as it traps cold pockets of air, but I struggle on with a mixture of successes and failures.

In the summer of 2003 I made a special effort to record the various stages of the flowers in my garden, in pictures, over a period of weeks. This record has been repeated in 2004 and some of my efforts can be seen here -

My interest in trains has always been centred on the trains seen in the area south of London, England, where I grew up, but as I have got older, so my interests have tended to go back in time. In my youth the usual trains around us were the ubiquitous electric multiple units, some dating back to the early days of the Southern Electric in the 1920s. There still express steam trains around, of course, especially those racing down to Southampton, Bournemouth and far-off places in the south-west of England, which were only seen as places you visited on holiday, if you were fortunate.

As we grew up at school in our teen years, loco spotting was the craze and many of us used to get on our bikes to go further afield. For three glorious summers our school organised a week long outing to the Lake District, by train, for those of us interested in the subject of geography. These trips introduced me, if only in passing, to the industrial north and new and different railway trains.

When I was 16, I join the Croydon Model Railway Society. I was welcomed by the members as a junior and encouraged to participate in all their activities. After spending 2 years doing National Service, I came back to the club and spent many happy years helping at exhibitions and learning some basic modelling skills. I remember well helping the society with its large OO layout at the Central Hall, London show in 1958 and 1959. One friendship I made in those years is still going strong 45 years later.

Since those early years my interests in Southern prototypes and predecessors has become stronger and over the years I have built several model railway layouts of different kinds, but all with a Southern flavour. Take a look at my trains pages to see the wide range of train and model railway interests, both past and present:

Since I retired, my wife and I have had the opportunity to take some lengthy trips abroad. In 2001 we spent just over 6 weeks travelling down the east coast of Australia, into Tasmania and then on to New Zealand. Late in 2003 we spent another 6 weeks travelling parts of Australia and New Zealand we had not visited in 2001. On our way home across the Pacific Ocean, we stopped off at Rarotonga in the Cook Islands for 5 days.

Prior to starting our family in the 1970s, we had travelled South America and parts of Europe. In the years when the children were growing up, we travelled to the UK many times with them, both to visit relations and see parts of Britain.

We hope to continue with our travels in forthcoming years, but in the meantime here are some pictures of our journeys -

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v1.4 - Nov. 2005