Wonder Woman With A Shopping Bag

I hate painting! Specifically the house painting variety, or in this case train room painting. I had set out over a week ago to have the room finished and ready for layout building by yesterday but the endless acres of plaster board were defeating me. Then Wonder Woman turned up with a plastic shopping bag on her head and she solved half my problems.

I think my partner Louise knew I was struggling to finish the painting of my train room when I gave myself a break and mowed the lawn. On a list of my 10 least favourite jobs, mowing the lawn would come in pretty high on the list, just above painting. So when she suggested she’d come over Sunday morning and give me a hand I was surprised and a little skeptical. Afterall she’s building herself a new home and her every waking moment, including 7am on a Sunday, is filled with the thousand and one things she needs to think about. And I do mean she’s building it herself: she’s an owner builder which means the guys at the local fastener shop all know her by name, as in “what are you after today Louise”, she’s nailed over 340 joist hangers into place in between building herself wooden steps, arguing with the concreter and running back and forth to Bunnings.

She said “I’ll be there at 7am, make sure the kettle’s on” to which I replied “ok”. Then she asked, “have you got a shower cap,” to which I replied a confused “no”. 7am on a Sunday morning, what sort of a time to be getting out of bed is that?!?! And I have no intention showering in a cap! 🙂 Anyway she rolls up, sets up a mysterious piece of equipment and proceeds to paint the ceiling. After we’d finished and got cleaned up we had enough time to hook up the trailer and head to the biggest Bunnings in SE Qld and still make it back in time for a 12 noon meeting with some young bloke she’s hired to work on her house build on weekends.

And if you’re wondering, yes that’s a plastic shopping bag on Louise’s head. Something about needing to protect her hair. At least this explains why she wanted to know if I owned a shower cap.

Now I can’t say exactly how long it would have taken me to roller the entire ceiling but I would guess at least 6-8 hours. Louise and her fancy little Wagner spray machine had the whole job knocked over in 2 hours. Of course she’d purcashed this in preparation for painting the new house she’s building. Me, I’d rather spend money on my trains 🙂

The only problem is I can’t tell her I’m writing this because she doesn’t know I took the photo and if she finds out I posted it my life won’t be worth living 🙂

A Tale Of Two Desks

Years of reading model railway publications in addition to personal experience have convinced me that, if you’re going to get much modelling done, you need a comfortable place to undertake the activity. I draw a distinction here between the space where we build our layouts and where we build our models. Just because a layout room and a modelling work table can be located in the same space, this doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be: a modelling table might be in the same room as the layout, in an adjacent room, a room in another part of the house or, as in my case, about one and a half hours drive from where I will eventually build my layout.

There seems to be a theme running through some of my recent posts on this blog that parallel what’s happening in my life at the time I write them. So I’ll apologise up front for this being another of my “filler” posts, where I rabbit on about all the complicated manoeuvres I’ve been going through getting to a point where I can actually start to build my next layout, rather than describing actually building it.

In spite of all expectations the house where the latest incarnation of Morpeth was going to be built sold relatively quickly and as a consequence has to be vacated in the next few weeks. I’ve been gradually working on getting the house emptied of contents for a couple of months but, now that someone has actually offered to buy it, I’ve been in a mad rush trying to finalize this emptying process to get it ready to hand over. My partner and I have been trying to cram anything we haven’t tossed out or sold online into a spare garage and into our main home. That’s the home we share, on the rare occasions we actually see each other. This is also the house we’re going to eventually tear down or have hauled away so we can build my new train room…oh, and the new house of course! 🙂

Before I go on I probably need to explain I actually have two modelling desks, one for best and one for away games. My main modelling desk is a creaky old student’s desk I acquired for the princely sum of $15 from a deceased estate. At the same time that I picked up this desk I also acquired a very nice piece of ancient, thick plywood that I used to make a hutch for the desk. You can see it in the photo below: everything above the level of the work surface has been added by myself. Not terribly pretty I’ll admit but this was custom-made to fit my needs and it has worked wonderfully well for the last 15 years. I’ve never had to modify it in all that time except to glue bits of the original desk back on when they fall off, and they do fall off fairly regularly 🙂

This old desk and hutch may be a hotchpotch of cheap student desk, ply and left over pine, but it works perfectly well as a modelling desk. I would estimate that about 90% of my modelling has been done on this desk over the last 15 years has.

My other modelling desk is an old second-hand roll top item I picked up cheap and re-purposed a few years ago when a career move led me to live in a different location during the week. Because of this split existence I needed somewhere to work at home on weekends and somewhere to work on weeknights. Both desks work well as modelling spaces: they have flat, level work surfaces, plenty of drawers and storage, hooks to hang things from and lots of nooks and crannies. I really like nooks and crannies. The roll top is definitely a better looking piece of furniture and it has the advantage that you can roll the top down, thus hiding the mess of my modelling endeavours and protecting same from wayward felines. However, in my opinion, the best feature of these modelling desks is that both are mounted on wheels. The roll top desk in particular is a hulking, great beast made from solid pine and moving is made infinitely more manageable by the wheels!

As things really started to get a bit manic while I emptied the house it suddenly dawned on me that I needed a modelling desk in the house I share with my partner. I had the old ugly one stored in the garage adjacent to this house while the dressier roll top was over an hour’s drive away in my weekday home. At this point I broached the topic of setting up one of these desks in the living room so I could do a little modelling on weekends.
After working to cram all the furniture from three houses into two we were really pressed for space so it had to be in the living room. When I asked the better half which of the desks I could use inside the house you wouldn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce which one she chose. Not the one just 10 meters up the driveway in the garage: no she chose the heavy roll top one over an hour away and that had all my modelling paraphernalia stored in it. Moving it would mean emptying it of materials and tools, getting it loaded into the trailer, hauling it home and then maneuvering it into the house as opposed to just wheeling the one that was stored in the garage about 10 meters down the drive! This choice also meant I had to load the old one into the trailer and haul it out to where I live during the week! If this makes you tired just thinking about it imagine how I feel! 🙂

Anyway, after mucking about with this change over for the last week, I was finally able to do some modelling on my old work desk tonight. I have to admit that I love working at this desk. It may be a bit of a home-brewed job but the design just works: the sizes and dimensions were made by me, for me and I think this is part of its success. I spent all of my years of modelling in HO working at a workshop bench that had been built by myself to do woodwork on. It was ok as a modelling space but its essential design was directed at woodworking, not modelling. About the same time I changed scales from HO to O I moved into a small home unit and I needed a desk to model at and the desk you can see in the above photo was the result. It transformed my hobby and I flatter myself that I’ve done all my best modelling at this desk. If you’re “making do” with a partially successful modelling workspace my advice would be to do something about it. You’ll wonder how you ever managed without a dedicated work space after you make the change.

Please note: the only reason the desk looks so neat in the photo is because I had only unpacked my modelling gear and placed it on the desk just prior to taking the photo. After only an hour of modelling tonight it’s gloriously messy again 🙂

Ode To Indifference

I got the news yesterday that my dad had passed away. I got upset about this of course, but as I sat chatting to my partner last night I began to realise that a friend’s advice who was with me when I got the phone call had a good deal of truth in it. She had advised me to celebrate his life with memories of the good things I’d received from him. That evening I came to the conclusion that one of the great gifts he’d given me was his complete and utter indifference to the things that really mattered to me. Let me explain.

Like most males of my acquaintance I realised early that I was a bit of a disappointment to my father: I did try but I was a complete ass a football, judo, cricket, gymnastics, scouts, sailing and a number of other ourdoorsy, “rugged” pursuits. Dad being a “pommie” immigrant, it is of course the round ball version of football that I’m referring to. Listing his interests like this, I realise I’m probably creating the impression I was raised by an English version of Vladimir Putin, however nothing could be further from the truth. Dad was a good man who worked hard, was quick to laugh, verbally witty and quite possibly the smartest man I’ve ever met. He was also accident prone, emotionally awkward and the possessor of a spectacularly foul temper on very rare occasions. I’ll leave it to those who know me to judge which of these traits I inherited 🙂 I wouldn’t say I spent my childhood years striving to please my father but I’ve come to realise that I did spend a fair bit of my youth being placed in one activity after another in the vain hope that I’d excel at something, anything, physical. As I say I did try but I simply wasn’t interested in most sports and after playing Rugby Union for 4 or 5 years I also worked out that many of them hurt, a lot! 🙂

Of course, as is the way with these things, my father was completely indifferent to the things I was really interested in which could fairly be described as books, trains and wanting to play the guitar like Jimmy Page. I have a very vivid memory of him making fun of my early efforts at learning the guitar: dancing about humming “Little Brown Jug” which happened to be the song I was labouring over from the Mel Bay guitar book. Did this have an impact? Well I gave up most activities he pushed me into after about 18 months but I kept up my guitar lessons, playing in bands and dreaming of lead guitar glory for something like 15 years. Maybe he did have some part to play.

I’ve been involved in the hobby of model trains as an adult for something like 25 years. For all of that time I’ve been reading model train magazines and one constant throughout all that reading is the number of times hobbyists have mentioned they got their start from the gift of a train set, a father or uncle who worked for the railways or a father/grandfather who had a layout. Not me. My father was utterly indifferent to my interest in model trains, planes and tanks. In fact if he’d been asked I’m not sure he’d have been even faintly aware that I spent a great of my youth assembling kits, painting tiny figures and helping my friends set up circles of train track on which we could run trains. For me trains were something magical that happened on the concrete floor of a friend’s garage. My family didn’t have the money for either the trains or the garage. So my dad didn’t see the hours I spent on my knees crawling about on the floor, the intense concentration I’d devote to these pursuits or the amount of pure enjoyment I gained from seeing a train finally make a circle around the track we’d built. Who knows, with even a fraction of that devotion devoted to soccer the world may have had another David Beckham on its hands, but I doubt it! 🙂

Older men in our hobby are sometimes heard to bemoan the lack of interest a younger generation has in model railways: they ponder how the young can be attracted to the hobby and what we should be doing about getting them involved. If my experience is any guide I would suggest that the best way to get young people into the hobby is to either belittle it in front of them or to be completely oblivious to any interest they do show in it. Is the future of model railways benign neglect? Perhaps I exaggerate, just a little bit 🙂

The Eye Of The Beholder

I got back from the AMRA’s Liverpool (Sydney) exhibition this afternoon after driving for 900km over two days. Long gone are the days when I could do a 10 hour drive in one go. I spent Sunday night in a motel in Taree about 4 hours north of Sydney and decided that it was about time I dropped down and investigated the Taree industrial branch that runs across the north of town. I took a few minutes to drive to the other side of the abandoned rail line that runs to a diary siding and took a few photos of the derelict building and loading docks.

I had to duck through a hole in the fence to get to this spot a take a few photos. Only after this did I walk along the fence line and discover that the old gate that used to allow rail access was wide open. This type of rail industrial archaeology is just about my favourite part of the prototype aspect of the railways. I find it far more interesting than locomotives and rolling stock.

I’ve driven over the road over bridge that crosses this part of the rail line quite a few times, especially before the Taree bypass came into use, and have often looked down at this building. There are more buildings further down the line and driving down there I found an extensive collection of old, rail served industrial structures. Some of these buildings were signed as being a fishermans’ co-op and they sit down near the Manning river. I didn’t have time to photograph these buildings but I’m certainly going to go back and photograph and investigate further. I think one of the things I find frustrating about period photos of railway subjects is how little of this type of infrastructure made it into photos. I realise that the vast majority of railway photographers were first and foremost interested in the objects that ran on the rails and this is why most photos are filled with trains. However as a railway modeller I spend at least as much time on the buildings and many other objects that sat beside the line and all too often a decent view of a fascinating structure, especially one I wouldn’t mind modelling, has a dirty, great locomotive or a line of rolling stock in front of it blocking the view 🙂

This view shows the rest of the building looking north. The rails run along the fence, just in front of the camera. The gate to allow access to the dairy building is to the left and wagons would have been shunted back into the yard on the line that ran along the front of the building to the docks.

In spite of this side trip down a long abandoned NSWR branch line the reason I was travelling over the last few days was to attend the Liverpool exhibition. I always enjoy catching up with friends and giving the plastic a bit of a workout over the Oct long weekend. I spent some time on the Aus7 stand on Saturday working on an O-Aust CV wagon kit and the rest of my time seemed to be devoted to talking and shopping. I really should thank Chris for organising the stand this year and thank all those members who dropped in and did a stint. I should also mention that Arakoola received an exhibitors choice award and Model O-kits received an award for best commercial stand.These awards were well deserved and recognise all the hard work those responsible put into their exhibits.

A shot of Paul Chisholm making some running repairs to a model out the back of Arakoola. He must be enjoying himself because he’s smiling. Paul doubles up in his free time as the editor of the Aus7 magazine 7th Heaven.

The Aus7 stand was squeezed between these two stands but we didn’t win anything, that is if you don’t count signing up the GOG’s Australian representative for a years membership as a win 🙂

Just as I was about to hit the road I got into a deep discussion with a friend and long time member of the Aus7 Modellers Group. I’ll call him “Trendy” to disguise his identity. He’ll understand the reference. As is Trendy’s habit he tended to get into my ear about the state of O-scale modelling in NSW and he made some valid points about the somewhat small numbers of modellers who take up the scale and who attend the Forums we regularly hold at North Sydney Leagues Club twice a year. One of which is coming up in a couple of weeks.

A view down the “O-scale Arcade” with Model O kits in the foreground and Arakoola in the distance. The Aus7 stand was squeezed in between. “Squeezed” being the operative word, hey guys? 🙂

Now I share Trendy’s concern about the numbers in this scale and the relatively low attendance at our Forums. We would always want more people rather than less. However I had to dispute any conclusion that this meant O-scale was in some sort of crisis or decline. As we were having this discussion we were standing on pretty much the same spot that the photo above was taken from. I can remember the AMRA Liverpool exhibitions of the early 2000’s when there was virtually no SG, O-scale representation at all. As we were discussing the state of the scale we were standing in front of approximately 35m of O-scale “content” and this was certainly not the only part of the exhibition that was devoted to O. The Berg’s stand had a small O-scale layout at one end of there stand and of course there was also “mild-mannered” Pete Krause in his O-Aust “phone booth” having money thrown at him all weekend 🙂

O-scale may not attract a huge number of modellers to its ranks but I think it is now a “mainstream” scale. Let’s face it, it is still very expensive to take up modelling in this scale. However it remains an extremely attractive scale to work in and while it may not have “arrived”, it is going somewhere. I’m not sure where that “somewhere” might be, but then I’m too busy having a good time modelling to do too much worrying about it. Just like beauty, I suppose success and growth are all in the eye of the beholder.

Chris Lord and Kim Mihaly taking a short break to allow me to photogrpah them in front of the Aus7 stand.

Slow Progress

Things have been moving slowly on the Morpeth line over the last few weeks but progress has been made. I’ve been working on installing short sections of track on Queens Wharf to allow this section of the layout to be wired up and tested. The sections of line bridging the gaps made by the extra length allowed in QW’s new home might be short but there are quite a few of them and handlaying track takes time.

Recently reading about the trials and tribulations of my Canadian friend and namesake Trevor Marshall, where he came close to having to rip the floor of his basement up to get at a sewer pipe, brought to mind my own mini-disaster about a week ago. I have owned my digital SLR for just over 10 years and since purchasing it I’ve made a habit of photographing just about everything I’m doing in the hobby. Model photography and writing about the photos I take can be described as the other half my hobby. About a week ago I managed to catch the edge of my foot on my camera’s tripod and down came the camera, smashing the camera’s lens, chipping a blue filter and damaging the thread of a UV filter I had attached to the lens at the time. What I was really worried about was the possibility that I’d damaged the body of the cameras as well as the obvious damage I’d done to the lens.

I was certainly upset by this but not devastated because the lens was a fairly cheap one and easily replaced. In fact the filters were about the same price as the lens and the blue one has turned out to be slightly more difficult to get a replacement for. I had been given a Nikon SLR by a friend a couple of years ago and I got this out and gave it a test run. This camera is a high-end model and is probably better than my Canon but its shutter was playing up and I couldn’t seem to get the exposures to work correctly. I really should read instructions shouldn’t I 🙂 What struck me was how lost I felt without my camera: I really felt cut adrift.I wanted my old Canon back! So in spite of outlaying a fair amount of money a couple of weeks ago for a new photo backdrop for the new section of the layout (that hasn’t even been built yet) I ordered a new Canon lens for my camera and it arrived in the mail today. For those of you interested in such things I took the opportunity to upgrade to a better lens with a longer focal length of 18-135mm. As is the way with these things the new lens was significantly more expensive than a straight replacement for my old lens would have been but this new lens will make taking photos slightly less challenging when I can’t get in as close as I’d like.

The lens seemed to work beautifully on the body of my camera but I won’t be about to really test it out till I get home to the layout and take some photos. In the mean time I’ll post a photo of one of the bridging sections of track on Queens Wharf I managed to take with the Nikon.

It Had To Be Blue

After quite a bit effort, and no small outlay of my hard-earned, my partner’s first comment on seeing the train room painted was “heck, it’s blue!” As she knew perfectly well that I was going to use the room to build a layout after the work was completed, I’m not sure what she was expecting: it had to be blue, that’s the colour of the sky! 🙂 A properly finished and lined room will probably have a positive impact on any future sale price of the house, so the outlay is not completely self-indulgent, but I doubt that I’d have had the work done if it hadn’t been for its use as a hobby room.

So to some key questions:

Why get the work done now?

Because the Aus7 ExpO is out-of-the-way is probably part of it but this is not 100% of the answer. Because of my work situation and accommodation requirements I was able to make some changes to what needed to be stored in the room. It was simply a matter of the space becoming available at about the same time as the ExpO being held. Another strand of the timing comes down to the fact that I think I’m ready for a home layout as opposed to a series of smaller portable layouts. It might be said that I’ve been building the layout that will fill part of this room for the last 10 years and have been hauling it all over NSW in that time.

Why finish the room at all? It looked pretty good the way it was.

And I’d agree, which is why I ummed and aaahed for so long about getting it done. Even though it’s only taken about 3 weeks to get the work carried out I’ve had the decision about whether I wanted to spend all that money kicking around in my head for the 4 1/2 years I’ve lived in the house. In the end it came down to a personal decision based on a balance of priorities. I had the money available to get the work done although what it’s cost would buy a lot of trains. On the other hand I’ve already got a cupboard full of unbuilt kits so this isn’t as big a consideration as it might first appear. Secondly, like every other modeller I’ve ever met, I’ve worked in cold, dark, cramped and baking rooms and sheds over the years. I know from experience that working in less than ideal circumstances tends to lead to less time spent doing the hobby and at my time of life I’ve come to the conclusion that, if anything, I want to spend more time doing it rather than less. I don’t fish, and I’m too old to take up caving, so this a “next phase of life” investment.

Did the trains have impact on what I had done?

Well yes and no. I’ve walked through plenty of houses looking for a place to buy and one of my personal turn offs are houses with what I loosely describe as “eccentric” inclusions and alterations. Things the owner has had done that obviously suit their “unique lifestyle” but I know will cost me a fortune to have fixed. The cost of this renovation can be justified on the grounds of my hobby needs alone, but I can’t justify altering the house in such a way that it impacts on its resale value. I’ve essentially added a neat, self-contained unit to the house (or an extra bedroom). The unit could be rented as a self-contained “flat” but I have no intention of wasting such a wonderful space on anything as useless as a university student! 🙂 Two things I’ve had done that were guided by the trains were placing one of the light switches about 350mm higher than normal and having a power outlet installed that hangs from the ceiling in the centre of the room. Having the light switch so high is to ensure it is above the backdrop of Queens Wharf when that part of the layout comes to be set up in front of that particular switch and the ceiling outlet is explained by my need to put the workbenches in the middle of the room. I don’t want to have power leads running permanently across the floor. If you look carefully you’ll probably spot these small things in the photo I post with this text.

At the moment the room is still a bit of a mess but it’s come up better than I could have hoped. Blue walls aside, I have a fairly strong feeling that I may never want to go up into the house once I get things set up properly. The new door into the room is a fully fledged, solid core, exterior grade door. I can lock that door and no one will get in short of using a chain saw on it! Bliss When I think about the things I have planned for that space I come over all warm and fuzzy 🙂

Vale – The Model Railway Show

In general I consider myself a bit of a curmudgeon and a Luddite when it comes to technology: I quite like technology but I’m happy if it’s steam powered. However a couple of years ago my partner Louise bought me an iPod as a gift. Onto this I copied my pathetically small collection of CD’s, purchased one album on iTunes using a gift card (this time from the kids) and went on to discover the world of podcasts. The album I purchased was by a fantastic artist by the name of Sarah Jarosz and I sometimes wonder whether her music doesn’t sit somewhat uncomfortably with Thin Lizzy, Neil Young and AC/DC 🙂 I listen to the podcasts (mostly sourced from radio) I collect onto this little purple device almost religiously as I model in my workshop. Along with good coffee and reading, listening to my iPod as I model is one of the great pleasures of my life. Until recently the podcast The Model Railway Show was among the small, spoken word treasures in which I indulged.

I was listening to one of the last episodes of The Model Railway Show I had not previously heard today as I pottered about my workshop. I’d been saving the last few episodes to listen to when I really had time to enjoy them: today’s episode featured Gordon Gravett and Dave Frary, two of my favourite modellers. You can’t get much better than than these two men and the interviews were among the best the show has ever featured in my opinion. The discussion with Dave Frary had him talking about a NG layout he had built for the Whaling Museum on Nantucket island off the coast of the US state of Massachusetts. Suddenly a small bell was rining in my head and I smiled at the conincidence that I should be listening to this at this particular time and on this particular show. While not earth shattering the story is probably worth the retelling.

In early 2003 I had decided that it was time I did some overseas travelling, so in August of that year I found myself in Toronto, Canada at the NMRA national convention. Model train events weren’t the only thing that I included on my itinerary but I’d been wanting to attend one of these conventions for a number of years and this was my big chance. What no one had planned on was SARS and my memory is that numbers at the Toronto event were well down on average but this didn’t bother me: I had talks to listen to and layouts to visit! On my second or third day at the convention I found myself sitting at a table in the convention centre and got into conversation with a couple of modellers who happened to sit with me. One of the people I was talking to was a coporate clown (that’s what it said on his buisness card, I kid you not) and the other would go onto be one of the hosts of the Model Railway Show, Trevor Marshall.

Now I suppose I could be accused of simply tending to favour the person who I happeded to share a name with but in the short time we chatted, I found I really liked Trevor. I don’t remember the clown’s name, but then again, maybe I do 🙂 When I got back from overseas I made contact with Trevor by email and we’ve remained friends ever since: sharing layout planning ideas, swapping photos and generally just keeping in touch on an intermittent basis. Nantucket was my next stop on the trip and I visited the whaling museum where Dave Frary built the layout being talked about on The Model Railway Show. Unfortunately I was there before the layout was installed but it’s almost exactly 10 years since I was there so maybe it’s time for another visit? As I say, this is not an earth shattering story, but listening to that podcast today brought back some very fond memories for me of the NMRA convention and my trip to Nantucket.

While you can still get podcasts of all the episodes of The Model Railway Show that were produced, for me listening to old episodes doesn’t really replace the hole left in my podstyle (see, even old farts like me can make up their own tech words) 🙂 What I got from the show was great ideas from some of the best minds in the hobby. The two hosts, Jym and Trevor, never took themselves too seriously but never made any apologies for taking our hobby seriously. The show dealt intelligently and entertainingly with the widest range of topics imagineable: everything from making trees to disposing of the collections of deceased modellers. I also liked the somewhat home brewed nature of the show which was very much in keeping with what is best about narrow casting on the internet.

Trevor had hinted to me before the show came to an end that he was finding the amount of time it was eating up was causing some issues: after the show came to an end he said that he and Jym were going to get a lot more time at the modelling bench. It would be nice to think that our hobby could commercially sustain such a show but I’m grateful for the effort that was put in and thank those who were responsible for producing it. I have a feeling that it was produced mainly through volunteer labour and by calling in a lot of favours.

Thanks guys, I will seriously miss The Model Railway Show.

You can find a link to the show down the right hand edge of this blog.