21 February 2016

Moving animals

New year, new resolutions. Thankfully one of them this year wasn't regular postings on this blog!

There has been some progress in the background since I last posted.  A veritable trove of Trove articles have been read, which promises the uncovering of the minutiae of a small village in the mid-century years of last century. Not all of these are rail related, but there was an amazing number of washaways, derailments and reasons for late mail deliveries.

On the HO scene, I engaged a works contractor to re-establish a static version of Eumungerie station in his garage. Its up and replete with the basic buildings, but needs detailing. Much more. So to start I thought I would investigate the stock races - though I can only remember them being called sheep races.

The races were a favourite hangout of mine, slightly less so during snake season which seemed to go for 11 months of the year. They were great to climb on and to ride the swing gates.  Though there was a 'pong' as we called it then which lives to this day. It just wasn't snakes you needed to be careful to watch out for when running around the races.

So I thought I would just grab a few photos and get into it this afternoon. Well, after a solid hour of hunting I have given up with the weakest collection of shots ever.  This first one (which I have posted before) starts promising - it gives an idea of the actual races and the drovers' shed - pretty sure that is what it was - happy to be corrected. It was taken in 1965.


Then all I could muster is a distant shot of the yard taken around 1963 (two years earlier) which I have chosen to show as 'extra large' so I can pick out a few details which are missing from the 1965 shot. First, some things are in both shots - like the water column and the drovers' shed (though note the small water tank against the north wall obscured in the 1965 shot).

The major change is that the two signals in the 1963 shot below are gone from the 1965 shot.  There is also a huge telegraph pole which seems to have disappeared from the landscape.


While I still know net to nothing about the races and yard from this photo, at least I have enough evidence to go out and but one of those lovely Austrains ways & works train packs. The wagon next to the LFX looks interesting - maybe an old D truck with a gangers' shed on top.

Now this last photo was in very bad shape when I scanned it.  I have retouched it as best I can - with a lot of lightening and noise reducing. Itdoesn't show the sheep yard, races or even the shed, but it does give a bit more of a clue about the wagon attached to the LFX. Oh yeah, and there is a 30T with what seems to be an extremely large load of coal in the tender for one headed to Dubbo so it may have worked tender-first out from there to shunt the yard and possibly pick up the works vehicles.


 Hope you enjoyed these fairly ordinary shots.  I am off to build a red shed.

Cheers,
Don