The Good Old Days ( in black and white)

The previous post brought back a few more old memories of the Dunedin NZ120 group. More precisely the largest NZ120 layout ever seen. This modular layout consisted of a large number of modules, and from memory was about 16' by 24' with an overall C shape which equated to at least 20 modules ( its 20 years ago, and I'm a bit hazy on what happened last week, so bear with me). The many scenes included Palmerston, Waikouaiti, Dunedin railway station, Burnside, Wingatui, Henley, Alexandra, and a few other that I no longer recall. With a main and a branch line this equates to about 160' of track, and it was possible to run 3 trains without hitting anything (which was pretty good in pre-DCC days). At the exhibition shown in the photographs we even had a linking module to run trains between our layout and the smaller Chch setup. However we found over to 2 days that our larger trains did not run that well on their turf. The main reason for this was the Chch group used converted N scale models and hence their clearances were too small for our NZ120 models. also the tended to try to model the 50's and 60's where as our models were almost exclusively modern image.

The first picture is of the overall layout, just showing how big it really was. The clowns in the middle are (from L to R) yours truly, my now wife ( who must have just been passing through to actually see me that weekend) and my brother, plus another chap called Bob. behind me are Glenn Anthony, and Dean Whohra (well, it started with a w. I'll apologise for any dumb name mistakes now, but you should all get simpler names so that English scholars such as myself can spell them) in the middle of the Chch layout. I can't see any evidence of trains though. With such a large layout some trains put in large mileages often running for several hour's or so at a time. John Rappards Log train put in so many hours over a series of exhibitions that the metal wheelsets wore out the plastic bearings, and my Dx's wore the drives out in the end.

The second picture is of my brother and another Dunedin modeler called Garry Marshall (we think), looking for the next train. The station in from of them is a model of Wingatui, and in the foreground a model of a sawmill ( John was a carpenter and joiner by trade, and delighted in building these models which were just beautiful replica's of the real thing)

the next photo actually appeared in the Otago Daily Times ( just to show how low standards were at the time) and shows someone with a great crop of hair working on what he still regards as one of his finest single models. the building was built from the original plans held in the Hocken library ( this astounded me, as I spent 1/2 a day tracking them down, asked for them, and 10 minutes later I had the pages that Gordon Troop had poured over in front of me) the building was shortened to fit the site (not obviously). The tales of what was actually used in its construction were recounted in a journal from 1991 (sorry, no month I can't remember).
The dumbest thing that I did was putting in so much detail on the road side, when no one actually saw it. later we added a mirror so that this detail could actually be seen. I've been told that this model was recently rediscovered in the storage area at the Otago model engineers. I dread to think how it has suffered.

Here's what the punters did see. A good collection of trains. the 2 Dx's were from locally made zinc photo etches. the Ab and excursion train are from Chch I think. The rest of the wagons are mine and came from moulds that either myself or John made. the Za's and Zp's were my moulds, and the 20' insulated containers had resin ends ( from a mould of johns) and plasticard sides. the chassis of all the wagons were plastic

I hope the few readers that I have are enjoying my jaunt though the back blocks of some NZ120 history.

( and thanks to my brother for the scans of several of the pictures. for some odd reason they don't seem to want to expand on the blog, so you'll just have to save them and expand them yourselves)