A look back in time.

After I moved to Wellington, Darryl and I decided to grow an exhibition layout. It can't have been the beer as he doesn't touch the stuff. It was all a horrible mistake, and some of the best fun I've had modeling in my life. My contribution to the monstrosity was Cass; 16' of central Canterbury scenery inspired by photo's in Geoff Churchmans 'Midland line' book.

As I'd had a lot to do with the Dunedin Nz120 layout, I decided that my layout was going to be much lighter and easy to set up. The 4 modules were built from 2 by 1's in a reverse L girder fashion. In the first photo we can see the scenery take shape. the hard shell was not that strong ( one night the cat fell through it, which gave him a hell of a fright), but managed to survive 4 years of exhibitions. One can also note the mess on the floor (I'm much better now I think...)

The ground cover was made mostly by sanding pinex onto PVA, then spraying with some spray can wheat field colour. it did seem to work quite well. in the second picture there's the tranzalpine heading up the Cass bank behind a photo etched Dx. these were done in Dunedin 20 years ago, and were on thick zinc. they were a real bugger to put together too. I did have 2, and have no idea where they went. Also note the test for the back scene height.

Picture 3 is with the back scene up and painted. Obviously it was just too tall at the first try. the trees and fisherman's cottage are in, as well as the bridge, that only ever had one girder. the Cb's were made from cut up drainpipe sections ( done for me by John Rappard) and with microtrains bogie's I think. The Dc top is long gone, but the SD7 mech I still have ( at over 20 years old and still running well). Its set to change from a Dc to a Da, thus reversing the life cycle of these loco's.

The last photo shows the final form of 8' of the layout. It also shows what NZ120 is best for, depositing trains in a landscape. Also note that there is only one track. I've always resisted the urge to add too many tracks to a layout. simpler is better and there is less to go wrong at an exhibition.

Darryl has more photos up from this layout at http://www.kiwibonds.com/NZmodels/nzmodels.html and he's always been better at writing in a humorous vein.

I've just gone back to have a look through those and there's some good memories there. We did a couple of trips to Chch back in the mid 90's when it was not the done thing to do going that far for Model railway shows. We used Pacifica shipping. They were cheap, and as it turned out, very good to us. Our first trip south was well organised, in that we flew down, did some shopping and then turned up at the venue to find our layout delivered to the door and ready to unpack. none of this driving for 6 hours to get anywhere for us. The only drawback was as I recall that they arrived home smelling slightly of fish....