Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2016 i Australian Model Railway Magazine

In Praise of the ‘Unseen’ For many in this wonderful hobby, an enjoyable side is the social contact with others. Individually, we may find the enjoyment in the challenge of track laying, engine building, rolling stock construction or, the largest of them all, building a realistic model railway. While many of these tasks are performed when we are alone, the opportunity to share them is one that is commonly taken. The club scene is one sharing scene, as is having like­minded friends over for a visit, or a ‘showing’. At home, when visitors call, be they be there for a few minutes or hours, there is almost always an offer of a cuppa. This is often accompanied by a cake or scones or something obviously specially prepared. And it is…

For as long as I can remember, I’ve made a habit of wandering into my local newsagent in the week leading up to Christmas to purchase a couple of model train magazines to read over the Christmas/New Year break. There are a couple of magazines I read regularly, not the least of these being the august journal you hold in your hands, but my pre-Christmas purchases tend to the more unfamiliar territory of foreign climes, such as the US and UK. I’ve been buying Railway Modeller on these occasions for what must be approaching fifty years. As a boy I would almost always pick up a copy of RM in an exotic holiday destination, such as Budgewoi or Crescent Head, so that for me, this particular magazine will always be…

Despite spending my formative years in England, and having lived in Western Australia for the past 40 years, I model the NSW railways from the 1960s through to the early 1980s. Having said this, I take somewhat of a purist approach to running NSW stock from the appropriate era. Also, I constantly battle with dirty track in hard-to-get-at parts of the layout. Seeking to resolve this, I purchased an IHC Track Cleaning Car, which is based on an American caboose. The caboose contains a cast zinc alloy tank that feeds track-cleaning fluid down to a heavyweight cleaner pad that is suspended on two inverted mushroom-tipped prongs and wipes the track as the vehicle runs along. It works extremely well, but it is conspicuously American; it isn’t remotely like anything that…

Ixion Models released the following statement on 11 February: Ixion to release Shrike Models’ HO scale 30T Ixion Model Railways Australia Pty Ltd is pleased to announce that, having come to an agreement with the new owner of the tooling, the Shrike Models HO scale NSWGR 30T class 4-6-0 steam locomotive will now be manufactured and released as an Ixion model. The release of the 30T will follow the Ixion Models HO scale NSWGR 32 class, and the production run of the 30T will commence once we have sufficient income from sales of the C32 to fund the production run. Due to rising production costs in China, and the fall in the US dollar against the Australian dollar, it will not be possible to honour Shrike Models’ advertised prices for…

Adventures in Access I have just received and opened my February 2016 AMRM. The first thing to catch my eye was David Bartle’s article about his swinging access flap [Build a Scenicked Swinging Access Flap, AMRM Issue 316, February 2016 – Editor]. I read it with great interest because I built my first access flap some ten years ago. He and I have never heard of each other nor have any knowledge of each other’s efforts, but his method of construction is almost identical to my first effort. I say first effort, because I have had so many problems that I am about to commission my third and I can see that David has already found his first problem; timber swelling in wet weather. Just over ten years ago, aged…

In the early days of World War II, as a young child, I accompanied a cousin on a shopping excursion to town. Passing a newsagent’s shop, I saw a wonderful sight in the shop window. It was a Christmas tree and around the base ran an electric train. I was enthralled by the display and decided I had to ‘have one of those’. I had to be dragged away to complete the shopping. When I started high school, I had to travel across Sydney by public transport and part of the journey took me through Central station. I passed a newsstand in the Eddy Avenue entrance and stopped to look at magazines. There I saw my first copy of the now long-gone English publication, Model Railway News, and I was…

The advent of ‘ready-to-place’ buildings, along with the huge range of r-t-r locomotives and rolling stock, has certainly made building a complete layout a lot quicker and easier than it has ever been. However, the ‘downside’ of r-t-p models is that they are usually painted in a factory to a price and usually aren’t painted in appropriate colours for the period or usage of the item. If this level of authenticity is important to the modeller (for many, I know, it is not), the convenience of having the ready-to-place item can be outweighed by the inappropriateness of the finish. There is a simple solution to the dilemma of liking the convenience of r-t-p models, but not liking the finish though… repaint it! Just because something is r-t-p doesn’t mean one…

One thing of which we don’t have many in Victoria is tunnels, but that is not the reason for the photo taken on the preserved Healesville line [Photo 1]. The trees around the tunnel mouth and alongside the track in this and Photo 2 illustrate what I would like to discuss this time. Notice how in each of the photos the cleared farmland just the other side of the tree belt has been concealed. We can do this on our layouts using foliage, but we also need to be aware of the types of trees in the locality we are modelling. The forest through which the Puffing Billy track runs is a very different proposition and would require the construction of some massive trees to get the correct impression [Photo…

With the sad passing of Kevan Hardacre, it is only fitting to acknowledge his contribution to this magazine. When I took on the management of AMRM in the early 1970s, the magazine was faced with a considerable printer’s debt and many individuals came forward offering help in the way of financial support or technical assistance. AMRM readers will always be indebted to Peter Duckett and Bill Gardner, for they committed their companies, Model Dockyard and Australian Model Craft respectively, to more advertising space than they required, so as to make the task of overcoming the debt less burdensome. The technical support came from a group of draughtsmen and a photographer – their names have appeared often in the magazine. Like Peter and Bill, they saw that the magazine needed some…

Running a popular and easily found website (www.modeltrainsnthings.com) that deals with model and prototype trains means that it’s not uncommon for me to receive phone calls and emails from wives or children of men who have spent much of their lives collecting model trains and have now passed on, leaving their treasures behind them. These people who contact me aren’t looking for counselling, although you can often still hear the grief in their voices and their emails. What they are looking for is some guidance on what they should do with the things that their loved one has left behind. They know the model trains left behind were valuable, but they’re not interested in keeping them and, in many cases, those left behind need to find some value in those…

I had always wanted to build New South Wales locos in Gauge One. A couple of years ago at a meeting of the LGB and G scale model railway club, my wife Margie and I met Vera and Lyle James. Like me, Lyle is very interested in modelling the NSWGR in Gauge One. Sometime later, Lyle suggested that I build a model of 1919 for him, since that loco ran for a while at Glenreagh under the care of the Glenreagh Mountain Railway. I wasn’t sure how serious he was, but I decided to build it anyway. I wanted one too. The first thing was to get a plan and some photos. The plan was an excellent Data Sheet by Greg Edwards. This was available from the Barnes Hobbies. The…

NSWGR ‘Coles’ 7t Steam Crane (No.1070) kit in HO scale by Oz Kits. Available from Anton’s Trains, PO Box 236, Castle Hill 1765. Ph: (02) 9634 3475. Website: antonstrains.com.au . Price: $295.00 (plus P&P). This kit consists of approximately 80 or so parts. These are mainly of brass or whitemetal, in addition to a cast urethane boiler, some small wooden boards and HO scale coal to detail the coal bunker. You will also receive the instructions and three photographs; two of the photographs depict a mostly completed model and one photograph of the prototype in service condition, shot from the rear. All of this is housed within a small, thin cardboard box with an additional black and white photograph of the prototype and a label on the…

HURSTBRIDGE – VIC. March 26-27, 2016. Yarra Valley Model Railway Club, second exhibition at Hurstbridge Hall, 974 Heidelberg-Kinglake (Main Rd) Hurstbridge. 9.00am-5.00pm Easter Sat, 10.00am-4.00pm Easter Sun. Adults $8.00, Children/Pensioners $5.00, Family $20.00. www.yarravalleymrc.com BENDIGO – VIC. March 26-28, 2016. Bendigo Model Railroaders Inc. Exhibition, St Andrews Uniting Church Hall, Myers St Bendigo. 10.00am–5.00pm (Sat & Sun), 10.00am-4.00pm (Mon). Adults $9, Children $4, Families $22. Mark Gair 0418 340 399 bendigomodelrailroaders@gmail.com KALEEN – ACT. April 2-3, 2016. Canberra Model Railway Expo, U of C High School,104 Baldwin Drive, Kaleen, ACT. 9.00am-5.00pm (Sat), 9.00am-4.00pm (Sun). Adults $10, Children, Concession holders $5, family $25. Andrew Lund (02) 6231 9799. cmrcexpo @cmrci.info. www.canberra-model-railway-club.webs.com BOWEN HILLS– QLD. May 7-8, 2016. Brisbane Model train Show, Brisbane Showgrounds, Marquee Pavilion, entrance from O’Connell Terrace. 9.00am-5.00pm (Sat),…