Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2021 i Australian Model Railway Magazine

The Operational Dimension Operational sessions can add a new dimension to your layout. Your modelling era comes to life as your mates ‘work’ the layout. A Town Like Alice was my first dedicated ‘operational’ layout, based on Alice Springs in the Northern Territory during the Australian National era. Alice Springs is operationally like a UK terminal branch line station, but with an Australian modern twist. Alice Springs has traditional facilities such as a goods shed, passenger station, locomotive depot and industrial sidings. It also has intermodal sidings and a stock race at Roe Creek. In this era, the Alice Springs express goods trains No. 347 down and No. 166 up, had a great cross-section of rolling stock. This included stock vans, louvred vans, fuel tankers, trailer-on-flat car (TOFC) double stacks,…

Name: The Kanunda and Emu Flat Railway Scale: HO Period: early 1980s Layout type: walk-in folded dogbone. Layout size: 7.6 m x 2.7 m Rail height above floor: 1290–1350 mm Base-boards: modular with L-girders Track: Peco code 100 Control: Lenz DCC Buildings and structures: scratch-built and kit-bashed Locomotives: RTR Austrains, Auscision, Lima, Powerline and Trainorama Rolling stock: BGB kits, Steam Era Models kits, Strath Hobbies and RTR from Lima, Powerline, Life-Like and Trainorama Builder: Ken House…

In March 1999 V/Line Freight was sold to consortium Freight Victoria, which included a United States of America company, Rail America. V/Line Freight became Freight Victoria (FV). The new company started using a new livery of dark green and yellow, a livery that harks back to the VR era with yellow wings on the nose. In September 1999, G543 was the first G class to receive the new livery. V/Line liveried G517 and G518 were wrecked in a fatal headon collision at Ararat on 26 November 1999. Both units were deemed beyond economic repair and were written off and scrapped in May 2001. In March 2000 Freight Victoria was renamed Freight Australia (FA). With the new branding came new work. FA won grain and log contracts in New South Wales,…

To make the job of the steel terminal crew (actually the driver) on my layout easier for loading and unloading the NCOF coil wire wagon, I made a tool from 0.080-inch x 0.080-inch square strip styrene. Alternatively, 0.060-inch x 0.060-inch square strip styrene is almost as good. The first version of the tool had two parallel tongs and it could load or unload four wire coils at a time using the tool from a single slot in the NCOF wagon. After manually placing two wire coils onto each of the tongs, align the tool above one of the slots in an empty wagon, lower the coils into the slot and withdraw the tool horizontally. Thus, the four wire coils are loaded simultaneously into one of the slots in the wagon.…

Although I had no experience in operating sessions when I started planning the Kanunda and Emu Flat Railway (K&EFR), I wanted a layout that would be capable of hosting prototypical operating sessions for at least four people. The layout would need to be able to be operated point-to-point, but I also wanted to have a continuous run for testing locos and for visitors to be able to see a running layout. The K&EFR is a fictional piece of main line somewhere in South Australia set in the early 1980s. Being a freelanced layout I did not want to get too involved in having everything perfectly prototypical. I wanted a layout that would have the flavour of country South Australia in the early 1980s. Modelling the early 1980s allows for a…

One of the reasons houses cost so much is that we have to purchase the expertise of a range of people with experience and qualifications in fields most of us know little or nothing about; people such as solicitors, architects and builders. By contrast, very few of us feel compelled to hire in expertise to help us build our model railways. As everyone in this hobby starts as a beginner, we all tend to make similar mistakes and, if we stay in the hobby long enough, travel up the same learning curve. I’ve been involved in this hobby long enough to make plenty of mistakes and, while I don’t tend to make the same mistakes twice, there’s always plenty of new mistakes to make that I haven’t tried out before.…

Ken is a retired ice manufacturer. He is married to Margaret, with two grown children and three grandsons. Ken’s other interests include travel and reading. Ken did not start out as a youngster with a train set; he took up building and flying control line model aircraft at the age of fifteen and continued until the age of forty, winning several state and national titles for FAI team racing. By the time he reached 40, he found it was becoming increasingly difficult to find weekend and holiday time to attend model aircraft competitions due to work and family commitments, so he decided to take up the more relaxing hobby of model trains, a hobby that he could engage in fully during spare time in the evenings. Ken joined the Adelaide…

Long before I was out of short pants my parents knew they could get a few days’ compliance from me by simply hinting that a trip to Sydney’s Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (now called The Powerhouse Museum) was being considered as a possible weekend family activity. This enchanted wonderland of a museum had three primary benefits from my parents’ point of view: • it was reasonably close by car, • it would keep me and any of my friends who came with us occupied for a full afternoon with minimal supervision, and • it was free. From my perspective it had three outstanding attractions: • a computer with a touch-screen against which a human, including small children, could play noughts and crosses; • a huge German clock from…

I recently purchased a Faller kit of a small industrial steam engine. I did not have any specific idea of what I might use it for, but it was such an unusual and appealing model I felt sure it would find a place on my layout. Faller present the model illustrated on the box as a preserved monument in a park-like setting, but I felt it would be more interesting if it could be made a working model, in use to power a workshop or mill. In truth, given that the single cylinder steam engine driving a large flywheel is a fairly ancient design, this type of installation would be quite rare in Australia as it pre-dates most industrial development here. However, it’s plausible. Best of all I realised that…

Like most complex constructions that require operation, our model railway will need a control panel or a number of control panels. The panel, as far as possible, will simulate the important operational aspects of the layout in a form that is recognisable. That is, the operator can equate a symbol on the panel with an object on the layout. Panels are used to keep our train control hardware in one accessible place — usually geographically — at that part of the layout from which we most often operate. The panel will usually illustrate, at least in stylised form, the routes available to trains and it should hold most, if not all, the mechanics used in remote control of route selection. The routes are usually illustrated by linear markings with symbols…