SWINDON’S Railway Village was built in the 1840s to provide good quality homes for Brunel’s workers on the Great Western Railway.

Although most of the Grade II-listed homes are no longer occupied by people with links to the railway industry, there are still a few around.

One of them is Colin Trembling, 68, of Church Place, who retired from the railways in 1996 after 45 years’ service.

He worked his way up from a cleaner to a fireman stoking the fires on the steam engines and eventually became a driver.

He now volunteers at the Steam museum, teaching people a bit about the history of the railway.

“When I first came here it was mostly all railway workers who lived here,” he said.

“The railway was massive, it wasn’t just us on the locomotive side of things, it was the factory where they built the engines too. It was a huge employer.

“I started as a cleaner and I had to work my way up – it was a case of waiting to fill dead men’s shoes in those days.

“It was a job for life, but it was the steam days so it was really hard physical work.”

After he married his wife Joy in 1958, he asked the foreman on site if he could put them forward for one of the homes in the Railway Village. He said: “He told us it would help get us a house if my wife was pregnant but I replied that she wasn’t so he said ‘why don’t you pretend she is and put a pillow under her skirt?’ “I couldn’t believe it, but in the end that’s what we did.”

Later they had a son, Adrian, who had spina bifida and died 20 years ago at the age of 29.

Another long-term resident is Colin Woodward, 68, who has lived in Oxford Street for about 35 years.

He was seriously injured when an articulated lorry collided with his van while he was working for the water board in 1972, pinning him to a telegraph pole. He spent his recovery learning how to make models of buildings out of matchsticks and has since created extraordinary copies of some of Swindon’s buildings, such as St Mark’s Church and his local pub, the Bakers Arms.

He is currently working on a copy of the old town hall.

“I take a picture of the building and then make it all pretty much to scale,” he said.

“The pub took me seven months to make. I enjoy doing it – I go on until 2am sometimes.”

He said the area used to have a very good community spirit and can remember street parties held to celebrate D-Day and later the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana.

But he takes a dim view of the work currently going on at the Mechanics’ Institute, just down the road.

“I think it’s a complete waste of time,” he said. “I like the building but the trouble is they don’t know what to do with it.”