Completed

At the weekend I finally secured  the final item in a collection that I have been building for a while.
Its taken many evenings checking Trademe, buying small collections just for 1 or 2 items, and passing the unwanted on to others.

So, what have I got?
A complete collection of Railfan magazines. 20 years of railway history, both old and modern.

38cm high, which does lead to a bit of a storage problem, if one requires quick access to any article, for which I will have to develop an index of some sort. No doubt the editors will now release series collection books (which i think would be a great idea. The collected branch line articles would be brilliant).

Can anyone point me at a set of plain magazine binders?

Wharf IV

A bit of checking last night.

I think that the height is about right. Now I just have to come up with a jig to knock out 20 sets of wharf pilings

A surprise

While down south I was asked to help identify an NZ120 collection as part of an estate. While a large porton of it was Japanese wagons and locos, there were a handfull of gems. these included;
- A zinc etch Dx (2nd batch ) assembled by Kelvin barry.
-A John Rappard resin cast Dx.
-An RB Resin cast DFT.

There were also several Japanese steam locos.the standard 2-6-0 and 4-6-2 and then there was this.....

Now, this is a beast I've never seen before (which is saying quite something), and some research reveals that this is a B6 by kawai Shokai which unfortunately is long out of production.
The mech also shows that it is not a normal Japanese N scale loco as the motor looks like an old Bachmann 3 pole from the late 80's

Of real interest is the wheel diameter (8.5mm or 3'4") and the wheel spacing (12.5mm +13mm) which is not far off useful.
Unfortunately it is one of those things that is long out of production, and since this one is the first I have ever seen its probably as rare as hens teeth.

An apology

After my previous post, I noticed that Trackgang now sells S scale kits. Sorry Russel I did not know this.
So, the prognosis for the patient is not as terminal as first thought.

A question.

The occupants of La Casa Dandruff have been on holiday down south. Oddly enough a visit to Dunedin coincided with a local train show. Despite the wrong dates being published in the journal (and I guessed that a train show would probably not be on a Monday and Tuesday) I managed to turn up on the right day.

While most of the layouts were of the non-prototype sort, one that did catch my eye was Arauatu from Invercargill. This has been featured in the journal but I had not sen it in the flesh before.
As the following pictures show, it is a nicely observed layout with some nice scenes,

Apparently the back scenes are painted by one of the modelers wives who is an artist.

As I don't tend to have a lot of contact with your average S scale modeler and I'm not on the gated community, I struck up a conversation with the layouts occupants. One question that i did ask was how they found the availability of S scale kits. 'Trademe" was the reply.
Now this throws up a few red flags for me. If the average NZR modeler can't get kits from a manufacturer and instead relies on an auction site and estate sales, then its very hard to attract new modelers to the scale. NZ120 was in this position when I started modeling in the scale 25 years ago, and it was scratch build almost everything, which is not much fun for new modelers.
This lead me down a rather dark path with arrived at the stop "Is NZR S scale dying?"
Now I'll be happy to admit that the fine scale boys seem to be doing fine which is all well and dandy, but there does not seem to be the incoming base to support that indefinitely.
Now I'm expecting to see in the comments that the scale has never been stronger etc, but I'd like to see it backed up with some hard data.

Update; A check on the links from the Guild website revells that John gardeners website is defunct (so no direct order of steam loco kits ) and the owner of Southdock/Railmaster is reduced to an E-mail address. Good luck with the estate sales......

Organising

The modeling room has been,for want of a better word, a tip for quite a while now.
At the moment I do my modeling and painting on 600mm shelves that were in place in the house when we brought it which are now surplus to requirements. Now, normally these just live on the floor when not the current project, which is a bit limiting as there is only so much floor to go round.
last weekend I knocked up a storage rack out of some old MDF bits, and smuggled it into the house while the wife was out this morning.

So there we have it. a selection of 6mm wargaming projects on the go at the moment, but plenty of space to add other projects to ignore at my leisure.


Some of you will be wondering why I didn't just buy something from a shop. Mostly its because I'm cheap, but more because I wanted something that fitted into the room without wasting any space. The lesser bit is because we don't have many options in terms of buying items like this in a shop.
However those living in civilised countries might be able to find something that fits the bill much better.

Magazine review time

While on the way out to pick up a few bags of premix cement, I was able to stop off at the local magazine shop for the latest issue of the Railfan. In this quarters magazine we have;
-17 pages of modern image holiday snaps. That is a lot of trains. also a note that again DB gets the center spread. I believe he has sold his soul for these things....
-An article on early turntables.
-An article on 44' birdcage cars.
-The usual suspects. nice to see progress being made on the 88 seat railcar restoration just over the hill, and I must pay them another visit at some point.
For once there was not a lot to float my boat, though some of the early photographs may well repay some closer study.

I also picked up a copy of the Local rag (the Journal). several items caught my eye in the 10 second flick through, so I plonked down my money for it.
-A well illustrated article on sawmills in NZ, a topic which I have been pondering for quite a while. Some good info and photos which should aid replication the prototype in model form. One photo in particular is pretty much exactly what I had been planning to model.
-A photo article on John Agnews west coast railway in S scale. I reneber seeing pictures of this layout in the first journals we found in the mid 80's and its nice to have a more complete overview including a track plan. It was interesting to see someone elses thoughts on how to model a large system, as I have spent some time kicking round various plans on paper for similar layouts.
-NZ120 in the Journal jewels (which might be a first?) again its from the bench of the convention sweeping Mike Gee.
Negatives were;
-Peter Ross' column. when I read an opinion piece and come away wondering what exactly the point was then I wonder if maybe its time to let someone else do the writing....
-An article on building a 13335mm (or 44') guards van. This has somehow annoyed me to the point where I would like to tie the author up and beat him with a stout stick until he starts using feet as a measurement. When reference is made to 9144mm guards vans as well (yes 30', but why couldn't he just sodding write it), it really does just smack of the author being caught up in his own cleverness.

despite this, I would rate the journal on top, which for me is a bit of a rarity.