My name is Nick Duxfield and, as all of you who own and run model shops up and down the country know, I am Sales Manager at Gaugemaster plc. This job, and I've been doing it here for nearly nine years, has the most varied and enjoyable content of any I have had. My first priority is clearly maximising sales, this means having the best products and staff who are knowledgeable - but who knows everything about model railways? - and most of all, helpful. We are not a huge company so the range of tasks which confront us each day is enormous. I run from creating artwork for packaging, building scenic dioramas for sales aids, working with Märklin at the Nuremberg Toy Fair, seeing our DCC - digital product through to our launch of Prodigy Advance to coming to grips with the WEEE Regulations - that’s how everyone is to deal with their electrical and electronic waste. You name it, and with the absolute exception of accounting, I have either done or will have to do it quite soon!

That said the most enjoyable part of my job is getting out and meeting our customers, even if quite often it can only be over the ‘phone, showing off new products and hopefully persuading you of the benefits of these to your own customers, trying to help to help if there are problems.

I have been with Gaugemaster for more than twelve years - ish, time passes like a blur here. My formal qualifications are in ‘timber technology’ and I applied these in the furniture design and manufacturing industry first of all working in Norway, then in France to complete my training before settling down back in the U.K. I only left the industry when I saw an opportunity with Gaugemaster to make the big ‘mid-life’ change.

Full size railways have been fascinating for me since going on holiday as a tot behind a Waterloo - Weymouth express hauled by a Bulleid Pacific in Malachite Green - I didn't know what it was at the time and don‘t ask how old that makes me. Very primitive railway modelling began for me, with a Kitmaster 08, as a teenager away at school in the late nineteen fifties. I was just getting the hang of it - railway modelling, not the 08 - when it all had to be dropped (well not quite) for career, marriage, family and making ‘a bob or two’. I’m also a prolific photographer, mainly plants, fungi and creepy-crawlies and of course trains. I confound the adage that old buffers can‘t embrace modern technology. Digital cameras, Photoshop and the PC have transformed image making and I wouldn’t be without my digital kit - and the impact of ‘digital’ on the model railway scene in this country will be similarly universal. Obviously I am a convert and my loft layout will shortly be totally ‘Prodigy Powered’.

Everyone with a hobby brings different skills and levels of ability to their endeavours and also, after a while, a specialisation in a particular part of the hobby. With railway modelling it might be scratchbuilding locos with more than a dash of rivet counting, becoming immersed in the electronics and 'systems' side of the hobby or scenics. Scenics is my ‘thing’ and one principle I have learned is never to mock a modeller’s particular passion however obsessive it may seem. If it pleases someone to run green locos with pink coaches then let them get on with it. The other is that each successive railway one builds is an improvement on the one before, both as a result of acquired skills and better products in the shops - a good reason for never, ever, regarding the current project as the last.

I also, along with my wife Barbara, have a weakness for Chocolate Point Siamese cats!