Video tour

In June last year I made a video tour of the layout that you can watch here. It is sometimes easy to feel like that I am not getting much done on the layout. When I watch last years video I realise that in the past twelve months I have gotten quite a bit of work done on the layout.

To give you an idea of what I have achieved this last year I have made another video tour.

 

 

Please forgive the shaky video as I shot it with my iPad. I hope you enjoy it and thanks for watching

July update

While I haven't been updating the blog I have been working on the layout. After my last post about simplifying the railway I have been making a few small changes.

I have moved the dairy coop building to the interchange town as I think it looks better there and was probably too substantial a building for the small town it was serving. I haven't bedded it in yet so the move may not be permanent. You may notice I am not using town names. The coop has a Geehi sign mounted on it that I don't want to remove so the town names are now also undecided.

In the spirit of making things simpler the town formally known as Geehi has been made smaller.

the shortened yard. The yard used to end in front of the loco.

 

It originally had a very long yard, longer than the run to the next station down the line. I was also not that happy with track between it and the next town as it came out of the yard and almost instantly went into a curve that only ended at the next town. I shortened the yard by about 6 feet and moved the whole town by the same amount to the left. It doesn't sound much but it gives me an extra train length between the two towns which looks a lot better. It also gave me the opportunity to add some winding curves that add to the look of a small narrow gauge railway.

 

 

It was a simple change as the yard was laid on a single board. All I had to do was remove the track at one end cut a couple of wires and shorten the board. I had to remove a couple of point throw machines and all in all it only took a day to do. I spent last weekend relaying the track & repairing the wiring and everything was going great until I went to reinstall the point throws. I have managed to put a point over a non moveable piece of the frame! Doh! It is only in the wrong spot by 10 mm but its still the wrong spot. I have been scratching my head since pondering what I will do. I am still undecided but it does reinforce the adage check at least twice before you lock yourself in.

Less is more?

IT has been awhile since I last posted a report on the Bogong & Geehi. I would love to say that I have been madly working on the layout and I have lots of new things to show you.... but I would be lying if I did. Unfortunately life has been ridiculously busy over the last few months. Autumn is a very busy time on the farm with us sowing our crops. My wife has been travelling a lot for work and I have had a couple business trips as well. Add to this weekend sport for the kids and something has to give and that means the hobby has to take a back seat. It is right that family and business come before my hobby but the recent lack of time has meant that progress has been very slow.

This lack of action isn't all bad though. It has given me an opportunity to think about what I am trying to achieve and to review where I am at with the layout. When I started building this layout in February 2011 I had some very grand plans and some expectations that I now realise were unrealistic. I thought I would have all the track laid in 12 months and not the three years it actually took. I know I took some detours along the way but the reality of the workload of building a large layout by myself is really hitting home.

The recent inactivity has me thinking that some times less is more. It is a message that has been promoted by several blogs I read. Modellers like Trevor Marshall, Lance Mindheim & Mike Cougill have realised that time is often a limiting factor in our ability to build a layout and that a simple layout can be very satisfying.

 

This little station (yet to be named) was always going to be a simple passing track with a simple station, water tank and yet to be built set of stockyards. It is on a peninsula that is about 25 feet long and the only other structures is a farmyard and yet to be built farmhouse.

 

 

The scene above has come together reasonably quickly and I expect to finish it this winter. It won't take long to put a layer of static grass down and cover the hills with trees. The most time consuming task will be building the farmhouse. I have always planned for this scene to be reasonably empty and I am happy with how it looks. I wanted a spectator be able to stand at the end of the peninsula and feel like they are standing on the hill looking down a country valley. I had some guests this past weekend and it was a popular spot to watch the trains go by. It reinforced what I have been thinking lately that "less can be more".

 

Let me explain further what I mean. When I designed my layout there was lots of scenes and structures I wanted to include. With a reasonably large space it was easy to find room for lots of buildings and stuff that fills up the room. The irony is that most narrow gauge lines ran through country that was sparsely settled. Part of the attraction of modelling narrow gauge is little trains running through countryside that was reasonably empty - just like the scene above. When planning I had designed my towns to have lots of interesting buildings, in fact I need to scratch build another 60 to 70 structures to complete the layout. At the rate I am currently building there is a fair chance I will never finish the layout and that is a bit disheartening. 

 

So what does this mean for the rest of the layout? I could make the layout smaller or reduce the number of towns but most of the heavy work of bench work and track laying is done. Rebuilding the layout would only add to my workload.

 

Well what if I made my towns a lot simpler? They don't need to have lots of buildings to be attractive scenes. Would it matter if the stations were surrounded by grassy paddocks? Compared to building structures scenery is a quicker and lower cost alternative. Looking through my library it more common to see emptiness than lots of buildings. 

 

I have looked at each town on the layout to see what I need to have a satisfying layout and I have reduced the number of structures I NEED to build, to just 20. That is a number that I can achieve in a realistic time period. I can easily surround my towns with paddocks of static grass so that the layout will have a completed look a lot sooner. There is no reason that if in the future I want to add some more buildings I can't scrape away some grass and find a place for them.

 

So if you are still with me after this long ramble, by making the layout simpler I hope to have a satisfying layout that looks completed sooner. I want to take some self imposed pressure away so that I can enjoy myself which after all is what hobbies are supposed to be about.

 

 

Roger Hill's Moe

I recently visited Melbourne and I took the opportunity to visit Roger Hill and his O scale Victorian railway. Roger is a very skilled modeller of both the broad & narrow gauges of the VR.  Roger has based his layout on the town of Moe which had a dual gauge yard. It was the town from which the 30" gauge branch to Walhalla departed.

The track is all hand laid on ties milled by Roger from cedar lining boards. He is also an excellent scratch builder of locomotives and rolling stock and won a best in show at a narrow gauge convention with his G class garratt.

 

It was fun to watch an O scale passenger train pulled by a R class literally rumble down the rails. It is easy to forget how large O scale can be but how impressive it is.

 

 

 Roger also showed me some Australian timber bogies  that he scratch built.

 

I came away from my visit very inspired and keen to go home to do some work on my layout. It is always great to catch up with friends and to see what they are up to. Thanks Roger for your excellent hospitality and I am looking forward to seeing your layout progress.

Narrow Gauge Downunder

The latest issue of Narrow Gauge Downunder is out and as usual it is a great read. The Editor Gavin Hince does a great job of putting together the magazine that showcases narrow gauge modelling. Not only does it cover modelling but has a good mix of prototype information too.

The April 2014 issue has a article on the farm yard that I built to take to the narrow gauge convention in Melbourne. I posted about it here back in April last year. While the diorama was in Melbourne Gavin took some lovely photos that he has kindly published. I have added captions explaining how I built the models as well as some photos of the buildings that I used as inspiration.

Here are a couple of my photos that aren't up to the quality of Gavin's, but hopefully wet your appetite to see the article

 

Thanks Gavin for the opportunity to showcase my modelling and I hope your readers enjoy it

Haskell Na

The wait is finally over and the On30 Haskell Na has arrived. The postman brought me one this week and it didn't take long for it to hit the layout. I don't have a decoder for it yet so I had to switch part of the layout back to DC to give it a run.

 

 

So what are my intial thoughts? Well it certainly looks like a Na. The level of detail is reasonable and it runs well on DC. It happily pulled a train of 8 wagons up a 1 in 40 grade without any problems.

 

Probably the one thing I found disappointing is the colour of the smoke box. It is a blueish grey that to my eye doesn't quite look right. It got the better of me so I fired up my airbrush this morning and gave it a coat of Testor's  Model Master "burnt metal" buffing metaliser.

 

 

This gave the smoke box a very nice pale silver colour similar to how the black Na's on Puffing Billy are painted. It wasn't a difficult job as you only have to remove three screws and the smoke box comes off the model. The wiring for the light stops you taking the smoke box off completely but it made it much easier to mask than if I had left it in place.

 

There are some extra detail parts that are included but you need to install on the loco yourself. I have already added the numberplates and pilots but I will wait until I have installed a decoder before I add the rest. I may also add some extra details like the pipes and levers on the sand domes before I give the loco some weathering.

 

All in all I am quite pleased with this latest addition to the roster.

 

 



 

 



Completing the mainline

After the inactivity on the railway of the last few months I have been fortunate to have some time to relax and work on the layout. I have been wanting to complete laying the track on the layout for some time. Late last year I got organised and ordered the Micro Engineering code 83 flex track & points I needed from The Railcar. I got enough Trackrite underlay and more then enough Masonite strips from Bunnings to build the spline roadbed. It was all sitting there waiting for me to find the time.

It only took me about a week to get the roadbed built around New Year and I have been laying track since. I had a big push this past weekend and yesterday I completed the mainline and the yard at Mt Bogong. This means that track laying is complete except for a couple spurs and maybe some revision of the yard at Geehi. It also means that I can run a train the entire length of the layout, and that is just what we did!

 

My youngest daughter Georgia had the honour of driving the first train into Mt Bogong. Without a stop it takes around 6 minutes to travel from one end to the other. With stops for water, shunting, etc, a round trip should easily fill an hour or more. I am keen to get some more rolling stock built so that I can give an operating session a try