Let the light shine on

 I will post a few more shots of progress with the HO layout just as soon as I get on top of this mowing (in May 2022 probably), but here's few shots of Eumungerie's station lamp case.  And before you wonder, no, we didn't steal it... 

We were pretty devastated in the mid-1980s to pop out to Eumungerie to find that the last station building had been dragged sideways and torched.  Amid the ruins, this little beast was just sitting there, waiting for a new home.  It has been carefully stored ever since and one day it will again light the way to Eumungerie.  Though this time it will be a solar powered light.  

And the cutest cap.

Back to the mowing.

Cheers!

Don

Fitzroy Street takes shape

And just like that, it has warmed up in these here parts of Australia.  

It is now balmy in the shed, and that is not just my considered opinion.  It is the opinion of a family of swallows who have decided to nest in one of the rafters.  These charming little rats with wings used the same spot last year, so it has been a bit of a running battle to evict them.  I seem to have found their current access point, which is no larger than a HO loading gauge tool (I checked).  It is now plugged and I think I am alone now up there.

A number of projects have advanced since the last post which covered the construction of Dubbo B Signal Box.  I was pretty happy with how that effort turned out, until I discovered a photo of its eastern wall a few days after declaring the project complete.  Here's a photo of what I should have modelled on, bearing in mind this is supposed to be a skillion roof.  Just look at the kink!

So, it really was a standard skillion roof signal box, but with a kinky eastern profile, chimney and pole growing out of the roof. Makes the textbook version I modelled seem rather bland.

But progress continues! B Box needs its shunters' cabin for company, and so I built a version based on the original plans, plus a bit of license to build the chook shed extension at the western end of the cabin. 

And these are thirsty signalmen and shunters, so there was an immediate need to build the Railway Junction Hotel, which has sated the thirst of many a traveler through Dubbo. It also had a great vantage point over the railway crossing, which I can personally testify to from the front bar.

The Railway Junction Hotel is welcoming, but it would never win a beauty pageant. So, unsurprisingly, there is no similar hotel model on the market currently.  So I rummaged through the unmade-kits box to discover these from Woodland Scenics. Yes, they don't look much like a pub either. 

Anyway, I started jamming this with that and soon enough something that looked a bit like a pub started to emerge.  The following shot shows the signal box, shunters cabin and the pub.  All need a few details, like chimneys, a door for the signal box and steps. An order from Uncle Joe to arrive this week should resolve a few of these missing elements. Ignore the colours of the models in the next few photos - once lockdown is over I am off to buy paint. But I am somewhat satisfied with how things are going.

One of the photos of Dubbo that has been emailed to me over the years really stuck in my mind.  Sorry, the photographer's name didn't.  It may have been Weston Langford.  It is this one of 3122T shunting in front of the Railway Junction Hotel.

Long way to go, but I can see something similar emerging.

The other thing missing from the western side of any Fitzroy St scene is something that fulfills the function of Furney's Stockfeeds - a corrugated iron clad industry which gives you something to shunt other than wheat and fuel wagons.  It has a sentimental attachment - my three chickens regularly eat Furney's products well into 21st century. And so it was back to the unmade-kits box. This time I found a couple of items which were built in the early 1990s as a low relief background, but never progressed (until last night).

I have no recollection of what Furneys looked like in the 1960s, but I can assure you that it has never been a double-story brick building, but it is now.  The one thing I do remember was the word 'Furneys' painted across the roof.  This will happen once I am again able to wander unchecked in the model shops of this land.  In the meantime, (a Bergs white metal with Classic chassis) 4913 has shunted its first empty into Furneys. Patrons of the Railway Junction Hotel can experience GM goodness in stereo.

And so to my final indulgence for this post. Again, there is a lot to finish and nail down but I really want to have a few 'peek holes' around the layout.  One will be looking out through the doors of the Railway Refreshment Rooms (RRR). I can recall sitting at a plain table with a milky pot of coffee, waiting for my baked beans on toast to be warmed and served. In my mind I can still see the mail train that had deposited me there earlier that morning.  

The shed can't yet serve milky coffee and baked beans, but I have built a shell of the RRR building façade.  Again, I have used the 'essence' license and gone totally rogue with the doors which were never that grand in real life but give me enough width to see into the yard.  There is a lot wrong with the following photo, including the asphalt on the platform not sitting down properly, but it gives an idea that the smell of baked beans in the morning is not too far away. 

That's enough from me this week. Keep away from the Spicy Cough comrades!

Cheers

Don

When modelling comes indoors

Its been a cold winter in these parts - down to minus most mornings and the train shed never gets above 10 in July and August (this year it started in May).  It isn't much fun watching a 30T shunt when you can't feel your fingers or toes, even under several layers of clothing.  So this is my way of confessing to (a) being soft in my old age (b) reluctant to spend time in the shed these part few months.  Don't worry, give it four months and I'll be complaining about the heat.

Anyway, while sitting inside next to the fire I have been inspired by the most excellent series of books by Bob Taafe on signal boxes of NSW.  The drawings in the books are a modeler's treasure chest and the maps are pretty darn good too (thank you Mr S).

As I sat there, inspired, I counted up the number of signal boxes I will need for the layout - 12! Including four in Dubbo itself, plus Dubbo East and Troy Junctions!  And no two are the same. That is a lifetime of scratch building at the rate I achieve things.  The load will need to be lessened by purchasing one or more kits, but it is still a decade of (under) achievement, even counting that I have 2.5 boxes already made. 

All this is a way of saying I have made a start on Dubbo B box, which sat on the southwestern corner of the mainline as it crossed Fitzroy Street.  According the Taafe bible, the first Dubbo B box was on the northern side of the line.  This was replaced by the one I want to construct in 1936.  The replacement was, as described by Bob Taafe, the 'classic NSWR country signal box' - skillion roof, weatherboard walled and known by the owners as the 'standard low elevation signal cabin'. 

As kids, we would regularly be held up here to see a 30T wheeze by, shunting the yard.  So, it came with my usual sense of disappointment to find we had no photos of the box prior to its re-sheeting in the early 1980s into a truly horrid looking box. Then we have plenty of the new iteration.

Bob Taafe points out that the primary purpose of the signal box was to shelter the officer in charge of opening and closing the Fitzroy Street railway crossing gates, as the signals were worked from Dubbo A box on the station platform.  And that is what I remember most - the bum side of a laconically posed worker, usually with a cigarette hanging our of his mouth, leaning up against the gate, also watching the 30T wheeze by.

Thankfully, I managed to find several good shots on various Facebook groups, which confirmed that Dubbo B box varied from the standard design (along with many other examples) with a door on the eastern end, rather than out onto a small platform. The following photo is a snippet of a great shot published in Derek Rogers's book, Remember When.  I have stolen this particular photo because it also shows my next modelling project - the shunter's cabin aka the chook shed.

The other reason I picked Dubbo B box is that it was a solid wall on the high (southern) side, which is the side most people will view it from on the layout.  Solid walls are my modelling forte.

Armed with all this information, I nearly built the whole box in a day.  Probably my fastest effort ever as I like to stop to sniff the glue as it dries.  Here's a bit of evidence.

The windows are undersized against the prototype, but they are a North Eastern product so they are a joy to work with.  I added another pane of windows to make up for the narrowness of the North Eastern ones.  And I impressed myself by remembering to not glue the roof on before it is painted and the window glass inserted.  

Here is a close up from the north western end - the window frames look a bit wonky as they are only sitting there. Every photo I have of this box, the west end window is open, so it is too in the model.  I am OK with the way it looks.  Chimney pot, guttering and telegraph wires to be added, along with a black snake sliding under the foundations.

And yes, it will be painted at some stage.  On 19 March 1964 a gentleman by the name of Howard Simpson took a lovely photo of 3080T in the vicinity of Dubbo B box, which another gentleman (Chris Sim) posted on Facebook.  I have snaffled the right hand 30% of that photo and reproduced it below, as it will be my guide for painting when that time comes.  It was once a very handsome box!

So, I am off to do another signal box in August, probably Troy Junction.  But I will be building that one our of inflammable materials as the prototype had a propensity to combust.

Thanks to all who contributed to this imperfect near-rendering of Dubbo B box - Messrs Taafe, S, Rogers, Simpson and Sim.  See, it takes a village to raise a signal box.

Cheers,
Don

Easter Progress

I figure I should pop up a post because sometimes things work out better than one plans - and faster too. A couple of posts ago I wrapped 2020 as being a year of great achievement as I had managed to establish my version of the Coonamble branch (everything is relative - but the previous decade had been a zero achievement zone).

I am not ashamed to claim that you can have a whole ball of fun with a 3 station branch line.  Just running a wheatie out and back, plus a railmotor can soak up an hour.  And until I get a couple of back boards in, I always have the thrill of possibly running right through the terminus and dropping 4 feet to the concrete floor.  This fact alone makes the crew stay attentive.

Here is CPH 3 arriving at Pilliga, otherwise known to the locals as Central Plywood. The photographer is about to derail the railmotor if necessary to stop its plunge.

In the recent Easter holiday period, 4910 has been deputising for the the railmotor - captured at Coalbaggie Creek on 27 March. Control wishes to advise that the use of a diesel and passenger carriages is only due to the expected increase in patronage, and not because the CPH is out of service being fitted with a bungee cord.  

Running the branch is turning out to be quite a time chewer.  However, I had promised myself not to let another year slide by.  So I had set the goal of laying our Macquarie (Dubbo) and getting a little loop going for the days/times when I am feeling less energetic.

The little loop arrived first.  It links Troy Junction (actually the mirror reverse of Troy) with the line which heads west from Macquarie. I hope you can follow this! Anyway, it means that a train heading west from Macquarie circles back and ends up being a train coming off the Dubbo-Merrygoen cross country line.  The main track of this loop line is laid, but I will wait to procure sufficient Peco points to finish it before I post more about Balliminore (yes, a clever combination of Minore on the GWR and Ballimore on the cross country line - thank you, no applause for the genius of working that one up).

The following non-drone shot was taken from high above West Macquarie, which is just as flat and featureless as West Dubbo in real life.  It shows a half laid Macquarie yard and the loop to the left. 

So, finally to laying Macquarie yard.  The best that can be said is that it is complete as of last weekend.  Owing to the lack of new Peco points along Australia's eastern seaboard (just who is modelling Enfield or Dynon?), the yard includes points so old they have gouges from Triang B classes. When the Peco container ship arrives at Port Botany I shall be dockside!

Anyway, the yard works.  I can shunt to my heart's content. The basic structures which scream 'Dubbo' to me - the station, the Harman coal stage, the 3 road loco shed and the carriage shed - all fit. The bit of paper you can see in the middle of the next photo is a HO scale 60 foot Sellars turntable. Lots more has to happen but at last my modelling to blogging balance is where I would like it to be.

I suspect not much more observable progress will happen this year.  A few buildings may emerge but the next phase is under the layout - my electrician needs to spend some quality time under the boards!  But, more importantly, I just need to run the layout lots to see if I can break what I have done.  This is almost certain to be achieved!

If you will indulge me one final photo, it comes from the late 1950s at Macquarie.  The west end of the loco shed suggests that it must be a weekend, with 1221 squeezed between 3016T, 3298 and another 30T.  In the background an infidel diesel lurks - a Lima 44 has made an appearance and is skulking into the east end of the shed.

Cheers!

Don

 

Ruminations and reflections

There has been some weird stuff going on in the blogger-sphere around these parts.  

And I am not talking about the odd (very odd) person who offers a range of personal services to my few readers, by commenting on posts about wheat loading at Eumungerie in 1931 and providing a link to a place on the Internet that gives wheat lumpers a completely different connotation.

No, I am talking about the stuff that happens when you write a post and then it disappears, completely, into the Bermuda Triangle of blogs. If this cost goes through, and it is looking promising, it will be attempt Number 3. And that is a shame, because the last two attempts had vastly superior prose.

Colin's thoughtful comments on my last post actually put me back quite a bit.  And its certainly not your fault Colin - your observations made me sit and think, neither of which are my strong points.  The 'essence' - yes, that is what I am after, the essence of a location or a geographic area.

I will get back to the month of ruminations in a minute but part of my thinking has been given to the girth of my layout.  I am very fortunate, Dubbo is not a stretched-out location.  Most of the yard is crammed into 760 metres between the eastern (Fitzroy Street) and western (Darling Street) level crossings.  And I do have plenty of space, as Colin noted.  It means that longitudinally, I only have to compress about 10% to get everything in.

But what about width? Dubbo's railway precinct is also bounded by Talbragar Street on the southern (town) side and Erskine Street on the northern side.  I had paid almost no attention to the width of Dubbo - it was just what I could fit in on an 800mm wide board.

The 'width' of the real Dubbo yard is about 270 metres, but I had limited myself to 125 metres stretching from the dock sidings in the south, to the second or third up siding in the north.  It turns out, that what I am trying to model requires about a 1400mm wide board, and I am giving myself about 60% of that width.  

The compression issue is more acute once you factor in the things that can't be compressed, like station platforms, loco shed, water tanks and coal stages.  Sure, you can nip a few millimetres of each but so many of the NSWGR's pieces of infrastructure were just plain squat and sturdy. 

So that is why 'essence' is back on the table.  

For me, the essence of Dubbo is hearing wheezy, clapped out 30Ts roughly shunt four-wheelers into each other, and the smells of oil, steam and BSVs drying out in the sun.  This latter smell will last with me until death. Hope the others do too.

But I am modelling sight, not sound or smell.  Although DCC Smell might be an innovation which should be pursued.  So, for sight, this is why I haven't been blogging much this past month. 

I have spent many hours scrolling through all the family photos of Dubbo, plus others I have collected along the way.  Thanks to several Facebook groups, and generous participants in those groups, a simple word search of 'Dubbo' uncovers the most amazing treasury of photographs.  Mid-way through this I was lucky enough to 'win' an eBay auction held by an esteemed reader of this blog.  My 'prize' was a bound set of Roundhouse magazines from the early 1980s when the quality of writing and photography was well beyond what you should ever expect from a fanzine.  And the last article in the volume - Dubbo!!!!

I even started charting where most of the memorable steam-era photographs were taken.  It gave me a result not unlike a dogs breakfast. Don't try to read too closely - the green arrows going everywhere give the flavour.

The green arrows have helped me identify the bits of Dubbo that are important to me, which resulted in another scribbly diagram. It left me with what I call the Five Cones of Interest.  Of course, this should be of little interest to anyone other than me, but here you go for posterity.  The dark blue dots are where a person would be standing to view the 'cone'.

The Five Cones now means that I am much more interested in getting five key (for me) spots on the layout just right, not the whole thing.  Sure, I would like the whole thing to smell of Dubbo, but until someone 3D prints a 57 class boiler just so I can tip it on its end and point it skyward, it will be missing from this layout.

Anyway, the Five Cones has led me to better understand that the essence of a location can be found in just a few angles.  One of the important for me is Cone 3, standing on the eastern end of Dubbo platform, looking across to the loco shed.  Here's a snap of 3144T and 3203 being prepared for a tour on 10 April 1966, which apparently was a bright, sunny day.

All of a sudden the task  isn't as big as it once was.  To get something I might be happy with will involve:

* finishing off my loco shed to a crappy standard (good at that)

* dropping a commercially available water column and yard lights in at the right spots

* figuring out what the wagon on the ground is (is it a KKG?) and replicating

* knocking up a couple of very plain fibro huts.

And of course, I will be modelling this scene 10 minutes after the locos have been put back into the shed for the night, so I don't have to clean any loco wheels.

So, for me, until scratch and sniff sheep wagons come onto the market, the essence of Dubbo will be my Five Cones.

Now, who reckons that is a KKG on the ground?  Maybe it was the culprit for all those smells over 50 years ago?

And very finally, on behalf of the many more readers that the Essence blog has, Colin, we are all eagerly waiting for Moblayne to rise!

How I got to the end of the line...

I had been intending to update this blog last Christmas, then in the New Year, and now we are on our way to Easter. Anyway, happy new year!!!!

For once I can explain that lack of blogging progress has been largely due to real progress in track laying, relaying and general model railway work.  And about time, say readers and critics.  

I think I left this blog last October after the first train had rolled from Coalbaggie Creek (Eumungerie) down the hill into a nascent Macquarie (Dubbo).  Coalbaggie Creek is only aan interim station on the branch -- there needs to be an end! So the fettlers have worked hard over the Christmas break, such that the terminus of the branch line has now been reached and laid out. 

The scene in the following photograph is a testament to this Yuletide industry... the right of the photo as viewed shows Macquarie rising from the swamp that the real Dubbo was built upon, the far wall carries a slimmed down mirror-image of Troy Junction, the long run on the left (where the silo is located) is Coalbaggie Creek which then leads to a 180 degree curve to bring the branch line into the centre of the photo, where the terminus lies.  And the terminus is the subject of this post.

It is great modelling something like Eumungerie, a place of many firm and infirm railway memories for me.  My problem with my childhood railway memories is that I don't ever remember visiting anywhere further along the branch line. In fact, I don't think I got to Coonamble until the mid-1990s and the State Rail wrecking ball had beaten me there, well and truly.  The wrecking ball makes things easier to model, but less atmospheric than what they probably were in 1968.  And 1968 is where my modelling head is.

It gets even worse.  There aren't many photos around of Gilgandra, Gular and Coonamble in the heady mid-1960s and those that are, from my opinion, aren't deeply inspiring.  Coonamble looks thin, washed out, stretched-out, laid on dirt and near barbaric.  It was, or at least the facilities were.  Gilgandra is more interesting, with a triangle to turn locos, but it isn't a terminus.  Neither Coonamble or Gilgandra have atmosphere suggesting a quirky, interesting, healthy rail system. Apologies to those with a better view of these locations - my mind is not closed to revising my bleak assessment upwards.

Until late last year this lack of atmosphere was a bit depressing, but I hadn't thought too much about it.  I had even dreamed up a compromise - a little bit of Gilgandra (with McLeods Flour Mill, mainly) and a little more Coonamble (a primitive loco depot, barracks, a fuel siding). It was to be call Gilgamble. Yeh, nah.

And then came the announcement that Coolah's railway was to celebrate its century in 2021.  I ignored the obvious - how can you celebrate a century of railway when at least 25 of those years involved nothing running on the line?  And my usual generous source forwarded the sorts of papers one needs to start thinking about just how interesting Coolah was/is.

Coolah has some emotional attachment - my great grandfather was the station master there for a few years after leaving Eumungerie.  And Coolah, like Coonamble and Warren and a few other places, was never meant to be the final 'end of the line', although that was the way things turned out.  Coolah was worth another look.  And in taking that look I could only see cute stuff - it is compressed, there is a skyline, it is four tracks wide, has a compact loco depot and is close to town (so a public house would not look out of place), noice concrete pre-fab buildings.

So out of all of this, Pilliga has been (re)born.  I say reborn as I have previously modelled a very small, fictional branch line terminus by that name, and I have a perfectly good station sign board kicking around in one box or another.  

This Pilliga owes more to Coolah for its creation than Coonamble.  But it will have something similar to Gilgandra's flour mill and pub, Coonamble's loco depot, fuel siding and pub, and Coolah's four-track yard with a low timber platform opposing the station platform (and pub).  And the freedom of a fictional terminus removes the need for a difficult rebuilding of a Rail Central station building into an Ac4 version. Then I can have a Railway Institute building, a local sawmill, a street to include all of those little shops I seemed to collect from West Ryde, and it goes on.  Even a park with a shay plinthed on it (maybe). And another pub. 

And of course near to none of this exists at the moment - it is all plywood central. So lets not look too closely at this photo, which shows how little exists.  But at least it exists.

Over the course of 2021 I hope to add to Pilliga, blog-post-by-blog post.  There may be breaking news about my soldering skills, given my new fangled fangler.  And news about the Country Killing Works at Troy Junction, and pubs being built in Macquarie/Dubbo.  In fact, I may even entertain you readers with how I have laid and relaid about 75% of Macquarie's yard, up to four times already.  It is an amazing, iterative process, tracklaying, my style.

Onto Easter!