Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? No, it’s a loco boiler.

​I have been dreading a certain bit of modelling. One distinctive piece of railway infrastructure at Dubbo was the sand tower. It was distinctive due to its height- being the second highest structure in the yard (and probably the city too). Here is a snap from the 1980s.

Thanks to a good mate on the south coast, I happen to have a plan of the tower. The sand container is 24 feet - 7.3 metres.  And it was hoisted 7.7 metres in the air. Yep, 50 feet is a long way up in the air in Dubbo.

The first thing you notice about the plan is that it isn't what got built.  But, with the Railways we all know plans were just to give you the vibe of things.  But I digress...

The sand tower was also distinctive because it was the only time a 57 class worked in Dubbo. To clarify, the sand drum was a condemned 57 class boiler, as noted on the plans.

The tower was also distinctive because it walked. Well, it moved, at least once that we know of. During the steam era it was located to the east of the loco shed, adjacent to the coaling tower. Once diesels needed sand, it the tower walked west to the other end of the shed.

I had resigned myself to not modelling the sand tower because I can’t afford to cut up a brass 57 class. And no one I asked would let me cut theirs up either. But yesterday something weird happened.

I was browsing a Canberra op shop, and did my usual ‘got any toy trains?’ line. In response the lady said ‘we have crates of them out the back’. Oh happy days! I was imagining Lassiter’s treasure trove, with Model Dockyard garratts and Trax 12s and good stuff. I was mildly disappointed therefore to find boxes of plastic British locos, molded to the rails. Yep, the collection of models which came with one of those overpriced magazine subscriptions.

I needed to hide my disappointment and, more importantly, I needed to buy at least one as an act of charity. Then my cunning plan hatched! While none of them looked like a 57, the 1918 Churchward 2800 class looked most like a 57 class.

Well, it sort of did look like a 57 class loco if you screwed up your eyes and pretended the lights were down low. So, No. 2861 became my boiler donor.  Remember, its the vibe!

Today I did some hacking and it may sort of work out okay, sort of, just perhaps. Well, there needs to be some filling and painting and weathering and a support tower need to be built, but or a dark rainy night it may just pass for something like the real thing. Here’s a sneak peak - just a location shot of the half finished water tank next to the half finished loco shed, with the not-quite finished coal stage in the distance, and the boiler sitting on a drill set (obscured).

But really, the sand tower is meant to be a thing in the background, which fixes the location as Dubbo. Here's a snap taken of 3649 hanging out of the western end of Dubbo shed in the mid-1960s (maybe as late as 1967). This is the typical shot I have of the sand tower in its original position - just hanging around as a blob in the background.

So, in that vein, here’s a shot of a hot day in Dubbo in the mid-1970s, where the near-new 4701 has been commandeered to work a trippy from Talbragar ballast siding (editor’s note: the IDR ballast wagons are simply gorgeous). The heat haze and the diesel fumes make it difficult to see the sand tower and coal stage as anything more than a blur.

See you in February!

Cheers

Don

Recycling is catching

Happy New Year!  I think I can say that still?

New year's resolutions are usually forgotten by about this time of year, or at least I seem to forget them until reminded in August or so.  So I have put mine into action, for once.

It is now three years since we escaped to the country, which also marks about three years since I hauled all my trains in their storage boxes into this part of the world.  And while some of these boxes have been disturbed since, several haven't and aren't likely to until I find evidence of Victorian Railway diesel locos hanging around Dubbo in 1968. 

In other words, finally having a layout which is pitched in a time and place has also finally focused my attention. 

I also discovered that, despite owning a lot of stuff I will never run again, I am in greater need of a whole lot of new stuff.  The immediate need is mainline rolling stock, of the bogie variety.  And there is plenty of 'new stuff' coming on the market over the next two years.  So, I hit the decision point - continue in my railway 'ark filling' approach, or get into recycling.

New Year's Day 2022 was spent finalising a list of items which need to go, and what needs to arrive, complete with estimated prices.  And, happily, they about even out! So I started listing and will continue to until the next round of purchases are funded.

The real winner in all of this activity will be a certain online auction site.  Happily a couple of locos have gone to people in a local club, while several hobby stores have already received the proceeds of sales made in January. And I have been on the same auction site, securing an abode for Dubbo's Darling Street gatekeeper and her family (thanks to a treasured reader of this blog).  So the recycling is going well at the moment.

Which brings me to a couple of mini product reviews. The On-Track Models TRCs and LLVs are just sublime. They run beautifully and look the part. They are so good I have to pair them with my kit built wagons to prevent them running off on my up-and-down trackwork, all on their own. The IDR BBWs are on their way and I suspect I will feel the same about them.  

Conversely, the Austrains FS passenger cars look the part and run like dogs - reminding me why I didn't buy them when they first appeared on the market a decade ago.  Their spoked wheels are going and hopefully that will improve the situation.  Several other bloggers have shown the way to reliable running for these FSs. Thank you to those who have walked this path before me, and written about it.

In all my website scrolling and drooling over what I may need, it became obvious that an additional 32 class was required at some stage.  As mainline rolling stock, rather than locos, is the immediate priority I wasn't really thinking I needed to act.  And then I read a post from one of the Ixion Models owners saying something like, "never say never, but we are unlikely to re-run the C32". Action time!

Within 24 hours, one of the few C32s remaining in the wild was purchased. It arrived last week. I only had the option of a green, maroon or a theatrically-lined 32 class. To remain consistent with the recycling theme of my resolution, I selected green.

Now, I know that even one green P class was unlikely to ever have made it to Dubbo, but now I have two. The Ixion low frame version sits to the right and front of the Trainorama high frame version, considerably brightening the view. 

I know, it is nearly a crime against modelling but both will go under the spray gun at some stage in the future.  I will probably need a cask of rose to get over what needs to be done, but weathered black is the dress requirement for all inhabiting Dubbo loco shed.

Until that dress requirement is enforced, watch for double green Ps on the Coonamble Mail.

Cheers,

Don

PS - the respraying will happen no time soon. It might be a New Year's resolution in 2027 or so.

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!

Great works: large and small

With the 2020/21 NSW grain crop forecast at 14.8 million tonnes, including 10.8 million tonnes of wheat, there is action on the Coonamble branchline for the first time in approximately two years. 

The NSW Train Tracker Facebook page has carried reports of 8236, 48138 and 48162 working 8830 to Coonamble from Parkes on 1 October for loading. The previous mention had been on 7 July with 8049 on 8M47 railset working to Armatree. (Thank you Mr Lloyd for  both reports). So, it seems the rust will be knocked off these rails once more.

There has been a similar amount of activity on the scaled-down version of the branchline that lives in my shed.

A mid-week track possession, coinciding with the contracted electrical engineer turning up and not just eating the produce of the district, saw lots of activity in the Troy Junction to Talbragar section of the line.  Followers of the HO version will recall that trains were running at Eumungerie in August, but the lack of a bridge over the Talbragar River meant that they were not able to get back to civilisation.  This was remedied this week with the on-site erection of a Peter Boorman Workshops Howe truss rail bridge, of the fashion which graced the real railway from its opening until 1981 or so. The approaches and the trestles are from Walker Models.

I had been hoping to get at least a single Howe truss span in the space but a snappy design decision allowed me to squeeze in a second span.  Will go into that in a later post. Installation has been worrying me sick, but I finally got stuck in with the foam packing from 157 Ikea packages. There was a bit of cursing but it all turned out OK, for a novice. The result is below - 3108T, of the Wombat variety, coasts across the bridge under a 10 mph speed restriction.

There is plenty of detailing work still to come on the bridge, but before that can occur it was necesary to convince the travelling public of the safety of the bridge.  So, earlier that day the real test had been undertaken with flying colours. 

Many readers will be aware that the Sydney Harbour Bridge was stacked with sotred standard goods locos prior to opening in the 1930s, while the Hawkesbury river bridge was load tested with near-new 38 class locos in the the 1940s. The two following photos from NSW State Records records these events.

With these precedents in mind, 3065T towed four stored Wombat 30Ts onto the bridge and it didn't sink!

While all these shenanigans were going on, the electrical branch was hard at work (or cursing like they were hard at work). The result was impressive, power feeds, droppers, cable saddles nailed upside down, it went on. Around 3pm yesterday we had the first through train from Dubbo to Eumungerie. And it ran without fault! 

We are now running trains and not just shunting the yard, just in time for the harvest season.

Cheers

Don

Demise of Eumungerie's station part 27...

Been doing a little bit of sleuthing, and of course the answer was under my nose all the time... well, in the attic anyway.

I think I have already mentioned on this blog that the whole world got a bit sadder on Monday, 22 September 1975, when passenger rail services were withdrawn from the Coonamble line.

Following that old saying, the trial separation worked and ended up in a divorce case, nine months after the cessation of rail services occurred the station at Eumungerie was formally closed. Along with 23 other similar stations across the state, the doors were closed on Monday, 24 June 1976.

What I was really after in my hunt was the disappearance of the main station building.  I had a clue, as the NSW Railway Digest recorded that on 24 May 1978 tenders closed for the purchase, demolition and removal of the station building (excluding the station manager's office, staff hut and lamp room) and the shortening of the platform to 16 metres at Eumungerie.

I will stop the story right here to explain that the 'station manager's office, staff hut and lamp room' was not some three-roomed, grand edifice. It was the 18 x 12 southern platform building, described in various publications since as a small windowless room.  This is incorrect too - there were two windows in the rear of the building where the station manager, staff polisher and lamp cleaner all took in the morning sun.  Actually, that is all made up, except for the window bit.  Here is a photo from 1980. Mighty fine windows.

Anyway, I knew the tender date but not the actual demolition date.  Then I rediscovered a pile of papers I had purchased from the ARHS Bookshop some time ago.  In it was an annotated diagram of the standard post-1926 Eumungerie layout.

Well dang me! Mr Observant had failed to read the scribble, which is blown up in the next photo.

Yep, it says 'Building demolished, Length platform reduced 12-7-78...'.  I have my answer. I can also now pin a trip I did to Eumungerie to a couple of days after 12 July 1978, as I picked through the still warm ashes and rubble of the building.  Missed it by that much!

Not sure what I would have done if I had been there on the day that the building was pushed over and torched.  As a hot headed 15 year old I would like to think I would have thrown myself in front of the dozer, but I doubt it.  Dozers are big.

It does clear up one thing though.  I had been troubled by a (false) memory that wheat trains were operating through Eumungerie without guards vans prior to the demolition of the station.  Don't know how I came up with it. Guards vans got the ' demolition and removal' order about seven years later. Sleuthing over and mystery resolved, file 154123 says so.

Cheers,

Don