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My name is Peter Haworth and I reside in the state of Victoria of Australia, quite close to Melbourne city. I have interests in Mercedes Benz veteran/vintage cars, aircraft, photography, world news, modern war history and of course railways.

I got started in model railways around the time I got my first job at the age of 16, spending just about every dollar I could spare on North American N scale (Union Pacific) and over the next 2 years, made quite a collection which included some 15 steam locomotives - many of them the massive articulated locomotives such as Big Boys and Challengers. I never got started on the layout itself, and I'm sort of glad I didn't too! At the age of 18, I took my first trip to China to photograph the last mainline steam operation in the world around the Jing Peng pass. When I returned to Hong Kong, en-route to Australia, one of the hobby retailers showed me the first production HO scale model of a Chinese DF11 locomotive - the very locomotive (number 0018) that took me from Hong Kong to Jing Peng (0018 went as far as Guangzhou). I immediately purchased it as a souvenir. Some months passed before I got word that Bachmann was releasing the QJ steam locomotives, which prompted me to sell my entire N scale collection in order to fund my new found hobby. Since my first trip over 11 years ago and six railway trips to China, the steam trains are quickly becoming extinct and given domestic circumstances, another trip won't be possible before the last fire is dropped. Chinese steam will live on, however, on the Wangkui provincial Railway!