See the model landscape, with steam trains running through it, that has taken 63 years to build

It puffs high above the River Amber on a viaduct that is strong enough to hold a cat and wends its way to Wenly, an industrial town of mills and mines that is situated at the other end of the garage.

It passes painstakingly detailed scenes from a time gone by: in the fields, there are stiles and stooks; in the river, boys with jam jars fish for minnows; in the lanes, horsedrawn wagonettes clatter between settlements while in the town, electric trams carry the millworkers from their terraces to their factories.

In Broad Hambury, it’s not Constable’s haywain that’s up to its wheels in the village pond but Cyril’s water cart, collecting supplies for those who don’t have taps at home.

Geese with tarred feet walk in flocks and cottage doors are framed by hollyhocks.

Yes, the church clock still stands at ten to three and definitely somewhere in the dale there is still honey for tea.

Retired civil engineer Philip Harvey, who worked for more than 30 years with Darlington’s Cleveland Bridge, has for the last 63 years been creating a nostalgic model landscape, with the railway running through it, that fills both his garage and a new book.

“Amberdale is inspired by my affectionate but hazy memories of the railways I once knew and loved, and is convincing enough to me to conjure up a little of the atmosphere, wonder and excitement I was lucky enough to enjoy all those years ago,” he says.

He grew up in Devon and went to school either in a horsedrawn trap or by an hour-long train journey through the Exe valley. “The trees did not actually brush the carriage windows but I like to imagine that they did,” he says.

As a boy, he played with toy trains and Meccano, but as a teenager, he spent a year in hospital and was encouraged to use his hands to keep himself busy. He became an enthusiastic model maker – and still is.

After studying engineering at Cambridge, he joined Cleveland Bridge in 1959 and worked as a site engineer on the Severn Bridge.

“I lived in a caravan which had a spare room with two bunks which I took out and I put the frame of the model in there,” he says. This was the start of the imaginary Amberdale, set in the 1890s before the motor car came along and changed everything.

“I married Caroline in 1966 and we moved to Eppleby and I was allowed to put the model in a room of its own,” he says. “We moved to our current house 25 years ago and converted the garage into a room for it. I am very lucky because I don’t have to put it away everytime I’ve finished with it.”

The towns and villages are names from favourite books, except for Wenly, which is a hybrid between nearby Wensley and a hippopotamus encountered in Whipsnade zoo. Most of the names on the shops are from people he’s met, and the engines are named for family members.

Over the years, the model has grown with the ebb and flow of family and professional life – Philip was involved in many of the bridges built during the motorway boom of the 1970s, he was responsible for the modernisation of Tower Bridge and was chief engineer for the manufacture and installation of the floodgates and machinery on the Thames Barrier. After that, he lectured worldwide on contract management and contract law, and still he managed to devote uncountable hours to the model. Every aspect of it, from the engines on the line to the sail reaper in the field – an innovative horsedrawn device which replaced scything gangs because it not only cut the corn but swept it to one side – is carefully researched and scratch built. Caroline, a floristry teacher, has assisted with the research and detail-gathering visits, and their homel is lined with a library of books that reflect the period.

“It doesn’t have to be accurate,” Philip says. “There is some poetic licence. It is how I would like it to have been.

“The message that I’m preaching is that, given a bit of patience, anyone can have a go. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It is just what you feel it should be.”

However, as the Amber Arrow Pullman service glides through the dale on a Saturday afternoon, the visitor to the model can see through the tiny windows of the carriages how the passengers really are enjoying a luxury dining experience among polished wood, white table cloths and deeply upholstered cushions.

The model-making combines all of Philip’s loves from bridge-building to painting and photography. He started recording the landscape’s progression in 1975 and now is fully immersed in digital photography which adds wisps of smoke to make the scenes even more lifelike.

In model railway circles, Amberdale has long been regarded as up there with the best, and now Philip’s pictures have been brought together in a book which takes its readers on a journey through the dale and back through time. In his commentary, he mixes references to well known poems with his own memories.

“Long sunny summer holiday days with bikes, shorts and sandwiches, beside and in the river, looking up as the familiar trains passed by,” he writes. “We put pennies on the line but were chased off by the nearby crossing keeper.”

The 4mm to a foot model is, after 63 years, nearly complete. “I am still pottering about with it. There are still bits to do,” he says. “Will I finally get round to fitting out Amber Mills with spinning frames and carding machines? It has been on the action list for 20 years at least.”

It can wait because life in Amberdale is conducted at a very different pace to today. It comes from a time when the porter at a rural station could slope off for a midday snooze, when there were milk maids working in the fields, when honeysuckle grew over the porch and clematis climbed up the ivy, and when the beer in the White Swan would not be cold and fizzy but warm and flat – just as the Captain liked it when he finally made it to his favourite perch by the bar.

lAmberdale and the Railway Which Runs Through It, by Philip Harvey (Fonthill Media, £20) is available from the Castle Hill Bookshop in Richmond, through the publisher’s website or via Amazon.