Cherry Hill, leading model engineer who made working steam-powered locomotives at 1:16 scale

Cherry Hill, who has died aged 93, was one of the world’s foremost scale model engineers, outshining her mostly male competitors to win numerous awards including nine gold medals at the annual Model Engineer Exhibition in London, and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, the top prize for model engineering – also nine times; some called her the Fabergé of model engineering.

Her father was a keen model-maker and she began learning her machining skills from him, beginning at the age of nine or 10 with a small wooden chest of drawers. During the Second World War a model she made of a Sunderland flying boat won second prize in a competition and she went on to establish her own workshop, mainly specialising in finely detailed scale models of 19th- and early 20th-century steam-powered road locomotives. “I make the entire engines from scratch,” she told the Ma​lvern Gazette in 2007. “Every nut and bolt is made in my workshop, so a full model will take about seven years to produce.”

The process involved scouring old patent drawings and contemporaneous magazine articles and recreating the mechanisms at a 1:16 scale. As time went on she researched more unusual models, many of which were inadequately documented, sometimes working from yellowing photographs or engravings.

Perhaps her most eccentric model was the Blackburn agricultural engine of 1857, designed by Isaac and Robert Blackburn at a time when traction engines were in their infancy and there were as many impractical as practical designs.

The designers placed the engine and boiler inside a large drum acting as a road wheel, driving it via a ring gear around the inside. How the exhaust was directed past the spokes of the wheel was not clear in the original plans, so Cherry Hill had to fashion her own solution to achieve a working system.

Her models might contain more than 5,000 separate parts, and all were fully working reproductions. “It has to work or it is not genuine,” she said. But while her coal-fired miniature burners were fully functional, propulsion was achieved by compressed air because oil and steam would gum up the works.

As a result of her researches Cherry Hill became an expert on little-known 19th-century engineers. “Everyone has heard of Brunel and Stephenson,” she said, “but there were a lot of very clever people in the background. I’m just interested in these people and how they thought about engineering.”

In 2007 Cherry Hill was persuaded to allow all her models to be shown together for the first time at that year’s Model Engineer Exhibition and in 2014 David Carpenter published a well-illustrated book, Cherry’s Model Engines: The Story of the Remarkable Cherry Hill.

The second of three daughters, she was born Cherry Hinds in Malvern, Worcestershire, on November 16 1931. Her father, George, ran an agricultural machinery business specialising in equipment for hop-picking and held numerous patents for designs and improvements to machinery. Model engineering was his hobby and he had a small workshop in the grounds of the family home in the Malvern Hills, where he encouraged his young daughter’s interest.

As well as inheriting her father’s flair for model-making, Cherry demonstrated his talent for innovation. While at St Andrews University she built herself a custom car based on a 1926 Humber which she soon exchanged for an MG TA, igniting a lifelong love of sports cars. She tried to patent a design for electric scissors, only to find that a Frenchman had got there first in 1918, but she had more success with a carburettor balancer, the Crypton Synchro Check, which was produced commercially by AC Delco in the 1950s.

Cherry Hinds eventually followed her father into the family engineering business as a machinery designer. By the time he died in the late 1950s, however, her interest had shifted back to scale models.

She remained in the family home, putting the contents of her father’s workshop to use and in 1964 her ¾-inch-scale Allchin Royal Chester traction engine, originally designed by WJ Hughes, gained a silver medal at the annual Model Engineer Exhibition. From then on the first prizes and medals were unstoppable, Cherry winning out time and again over her predominantly male competitors with her uncompromising craftsmanship.

To begin with she gave her models away to family and friends, but later ones she donated to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and are on display in their Birdcage Walk headquarters.

In 1968 she featured on the front cover of Model Engineer magazine with two of her models, a traction engine and a 1905 self-propelled fire engine. Ivor Hill, an American model engineer, saw the picture and was reportedly smitten. They married in 1984, and in the 1990s emigrated to the US, settling in Florida, though Cherry eventually returned to the UK, living in a care home in Malvern in her final years.

In 2000 Cherry Hill was appointed MBE for services to model engineering. Among many other awards she was twice winner of the Sir Henry Royce Trophy for the Pursuit of Excellence. In 2004 she was elected a Companion of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and an honorary member of the Society of Model & Experimental Engineers.

Her husband predeceased her. There were no children of the marriage.

Cherry Hill, born November 16 1931, died December 4 2024​