Michael McDermott is a model citizen. The loft of the Chellow Dene home of this former Bradford engineer is full of models he has made of carts, wagons, buggies and short horse-drawn vehicles of all sorts from ages past.

“It’s a way of life that people remember. They remember the horses and carts coming round, carrying wool, delivering coal,” he said.

The father of his wife Audrey used to deliver bales of wool in Bradford. It was for him that Mr McDermott first made a model horse and cart, round about 1980, he thinks. What materials does he use for his models?

“Anything I can get hold of. I made one cart out of an empty tin of beans. A wine box is good. Each one I do takes about six months, what with all the research and reading. It takes you over. You’re in another world. I like that,” he added.

His horse-drawn vehicles of varying size include a London omnibus, delivery carts for coal and groceries; wagons based on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show; gipsy caravans, and what he calls “Bronte carts”, the carts that the Reverend Patrick Bronte and his wife Elizabeth used to transport their household goods and six children from Thornton’s Market Street to Haworth parsonage in April, 1820.

The attention to period detail, no matter how minute, is astonishing. The Wild West wagon’s breaking system under the wagon has been designed and fitted. There’s even a coffee grinder hanging from the back. The green-grocery cart has illustrated advertisements.

Evidently, Mr McDermott regards these painstakingly-crafted vehicles as accurate period pieces which, you might think, would make wonderful teaching aids. He clearly loves what bringing the past to life in these horse-drawn vehicles.

“I don’t sell them. I make them and put them in the loft. Then I make another one. There’s enough to do a massive exhibition. They’ve never really been seen,” he added.

Well, not in Bradford they haven’t. He said when he offered them to Bradford Museums, he was told they had a long list of model makers like himself and no further interest was shown.

But outside Bradford, his models have been displayed at Leeds Industrial Museum, Yorkshire Carriage Museum. Horsforth Museum, the Great Yorkshire Show and the Ripley Castle Show.

He doesn’t make the model horses or human figures, he buys them. He talks fondly of horses, saying that people who had carts in the old days invariably treated them badly.

The film of the play War Horse especially touched him. Many of the casualties of the 1914-18 War were horses. Drafted out to the Western Front in vast numbers to pull guns and Army vehicles of all sorts, thousands of them were killed or had to be put down.

Similarly, he laments the loss of the two Shire horses from the Industrial Museum that used to pull a water cart round Bradford city centre for the watering of hanging flower baskets.

The horses, Darcy and Murdoch, were retired by Bradford Council in November 2011 to save £126,000 a year. These willing beasts of burden, about whom musician Phil Maybury wrote a song called Workhorse Life, were transferred to a sanctuary.

Mr McDermott’s other interest is local history, in particular the history of Allerton. Between 1985 and 1997, he had compiled and written three books and a film on the subject of Allerton village and the surrounding area.