Sir Rod Stewart has spent 23 years making a 100ft model railroad of an American city in the 1940s – and even had to book an extra room at hotels to continue model building while on various tours.

Despite claiming he “winged” the layout, the rocker shows off an intricately detailed model to the December issue of Railway Modeller magazine, which he scrupulously crafts.

“It’s the landscape I like,” he tells the mag. “Attention to detail, extreme detail, is paramount. There shouldn’t be any unsightly gaps, or pavements that are too clean.”

While Sir Rod takes inspiration for scenery from his trips around the world with wife Penny Lancaster, it’s important to him that the backdrops are 3D.

“I don’t like to see flat backdops, they spoil the illusion, so I went for more buildings and streets than tracks.

Just to give it a great depth.”

After starting putting pieces together back in 1993, Sir Rod hired someone to help light the scenery with evening sun, and roped in a pal to help lay the railway tracks.

“These were all banked, just as on the real thing,” he says. “The ballasting took forever but it was so important for trouble free running to get all this correct.”

Sir Rod developed his passion while holidaying in Bognor Regis with his parents aged between eight and nine.

“I remember seeing a marvellous railway layout in a model railway shop window and thinking if only I could get paid to build a model railway like that.”

While touring the world as a famous musician, Sir Rod still managed to find time to tend to his hobby, booking his model its own hotel suite so he could work on it on the road.

(Image: Steve Crise)

(Image: Steve Crise)

“We would tell them in advance and they were really accommodating, taking out the beds and providing fans to improve air circulation and ventilation,” he says confirming many of his skyscrapers buildings were built “on location”.

Asked if he would do it all over again – despite his passions, he wouldn’t. “If I’d have realised at the start it would have taken so long, I’d have probably said No! No! Nah!”

His landscape, the Grand Street and Three Rivers City, resides in the attic at his house in LA, and he has no plans to start another at his home in Harlow, Essex.

Meanwhile, he remembers how pal and fellow train enthusiast Ronnie Wood once joined him at a model railway expo at the height of their Faces fame in the early 70s, so the pair went in disguise - wearing floppy Fedora hats and raincoats and holding long smokers pipes.

“We had to do something extraordinary. So we went dressed up as Monsieur Hulot, a French film character portrayed by film maker and mime artist Jacques Tati,” he says. Ronnie once slept over at Rod’s house and hit his head on Rod’s train board when his mum came in with a tray of tea.

“He’s never let me forget it,” Rod says.

Rod has made a film about his scale model railroad, and is hoping it will air on Sky Arts.