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.
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!
