A site for my Model Railway Layouts:
Barcoola. This is take on Tarcoola SA the junction between the Trans Australian Railway and the Central Australian Railway.
A Town like Alice, my take on Alice Springs.
Murray River Bridge, my model of the bridge over the Murray river.
I have been investigating or looking at concepts, for a small layout, roughly 16ft in length.
A number of things have been lining up lately.
I have a couple of mechanisms for the NJs class and a GWA 1200 class.
The AHGXs were transferred to the Lincoln Division, thus I had some of the modern versions of them.
This means that I could build a ultra modern small layout on the Lincoln division,
The real change in operations is a train to a single location. Which meant that most of the sidings were designed to have a couple of wagons loaded at each location, not an entire train.
This introduces much more complicated shunting movements.
They are more complicated when there are main roads at the yard throats.
Rudall is on the Buckleboo line, is such a location.
The Birdseye highway intersects the town of Rudall. The yard has a single loop, and a single siding.
The yard throat is bracketed by the highway.
The yard has two silos and a bunker, the station building is still there and is the barracks.
We were lucky enough to be invited to the 50th Anniversary Whyalla Model Railway Society exhibition on the 27th to 28th of October 2018.
Its been a while since we have gone to a regional exhibition, I had almost forgotten just how much of a blast these can be.
Jim and Geoff did a spectacular job, I just wished we had allocated more time to take full advantage of the events on offer, not just the exhibition.
For Murray River Bridge this was a good test of the planning skills.
We had only three operators and the layout, lights, rolling stock, tools, luggage and people all had to be loaded into a 7 and a half by 4ft 4" trailer and a 4X4.
I had left a full day to load the truck and the trailer, however I had to inspect a house for Helen's Mum which was a fair distance from my place.
long story short we got it all packed up by 21:00 that night.
03:30 the next morning we were off!
We arrived at Whyalla around 17:00.
Jim had organised the accommodation, and he had done everything nothing to sign, they were waiting for us.
The next morning we checked out the yard, a GM and 22 were shunting around, and their ballast train was being loaded.
Jim had stated that we should meet at HMAS Whyalla at 10:00 have a bit of a chat etc, so I thought it was run over the details of the exhibition etc.
However it turned out to be a private tour of the ship and the museum and their layout at the museum, followed by a BBQ.
At the same time I was negotiating the house we saw two days ago for Helen's mum, so it turned out to be the most expensive tour ever!
We had a BBQ with exhibitors and proprietors, in a calm environment prior to the onslaught of an exhibition.
It was great to discuss the hobby and not talk shop, with Fred and Claudia from Orient Express hobbies.
The set up went smoothly, and we had time the next morning to set up all the rolling stock, and I had pre consisted all the locomotives so that cut down the time considerably.
Here is a picture of C501 932 950 and BL26 on a Steel train.
Here is a brief overview of the exhibition.
on Saturday night the club hosted a dinner and awards night, and it was a cracker, I not laughed as hard as that for awhile, we had Helen, Doug, Jim and his wife and Chis and Linda from Ozrail models on our table.
the next morning I took some shots of the layout.
The layout next to us was built by Anthony and Cassy, modeled on RJ Corman in the USA, its inspiring to see passionate younger modelers producing very nice layouts. Great work guys!
MRB has now traveled just over 5000km, and it's just over a year old.
Doug and myself discussed a few enhancements to the fiddle yard, and the Cobalt SS point motors seem to have passed there test at a full exhibition.
Thanks again to all, the Barcoola "bockscar Hobos" enjoyed the weekend immensely.
Here are some before and after pictures of NRs "weathered by Barcoola" these are now offered for sale by SDS Models. I am really happy with the results.
They are all painted per prototype and factory backed by SDS models.
Over the last weekend Murray River Bridge attended Caulfield Model Railway Exhibition, my thanks as usual to the crew, (bockscar hobos) Doug, John and Katie, Helen and the girls, Peter and Roger. Dave for his help packing up.
Here are some videos of the exhibition I managed to take during the weekend.
GWA grain.
Pacific national MP5
The ever popular SCT train.
AN era steel train.
Two Ns on the Overland.
This is a video by Greensleeves94, he does a great job, this is a video of the entire exhibition. He does a great job of covering exhibitions.
I made some changes to the layout at this exhibition:
We added lights across the front and a pelmet. I am not quite there yet, I have one more light to install, this should remove the dark spot at the end of the layout.
Numbers added to each road, and a stand up display noting each trains location and address.
I built a PN train, this turned out fairly popular, as did the SCT (as usual)
Transit socks were made by Helen for the back drops, they worked a treat, I can now look at painting the backdrops (without the risk of damage).
We also won another award, best private layout! :)
Comments from the public.
We had questions on how we did the lighting,
We had two requests from two separate blokes from Adelaide exhibition wanting our details, they seemed surprised when I told them I had applied for this year and was rejected, I think there might be a communication issue there somewhere, lets see how things go :)
Blog followers and youtube followers said hi, always good to see you all.
A Special shout out to Alex and his dad, great to see you both and for letting me know your favorites.
Things to do between now and the next exhibition.:
Install a few more lights.
Weight the SCT wagons, they are too light.
maintenance some locomotives, and rolling stock.
Repair some transit damage.
Install DCC concepts point motors in the fiddle yard.
