Layouts Based on Location – My Ultimate Decision Les Downey All Photographs Les Downey except as noted
Recently I read of another modeller’s search for a suitable prototype location to base their layout on. The story reminded me of the agonising I went through for many years until in 2001 I made my ultimate decision about what and where I would base my home layout on. A few changes of address prior to 2001 didn’t make decisions any easier but at one address I had room to build a 6 metre by 2.4 metre exhibition layout named Avondale (NZMRJ April 1997) to exhibit at the Brisbane Model Train Show in 1994 and 1995.
Wharf area on Avondale Layout at Brisbane Model Train show. However a continuous circuit exhibition layout was not what I wanted for my own permanent layout, One station I considered was Newmarket Junction, a station whatever permanent is? that I visited regularly in the 1950’s. Going back a decade or two before this I had always championed having a scale size replica of a chosen location. Trouble is that unless you like some oddball little station tucked into a tight space they’re all too big, especially in S scale.
And if they’re tucked into a tight corner they’re unlikely to have much of interest in the way of facilities anyway.
Newmarket with its triangle and head shunt was a busy station with passenger trains, goods trains, and local shunts arriving or departing to and from the three directions. It also had an East and a West yard which provided a lot of shunting within, and to local industries outside the station limits.
Photo by Whites Aviation
With the Opua Express train (# 15/50) being half a dozen carriages, plus a guards van and reasonable sized locomotives my condensed platform length of two metres was too short. And no I couldn’t lengthen the platforms, because with a minimum radius 900mm curve each side into the triangle and the adjacent two metre head shunt, together with crossovers etc, I still needed a length of eleven metres and that didn’t include even minimum radius curves away from each end of the outer points. So clearly not a proposition unless I owned a hall. LOL The final killer of my great idea came when I saw a scale length model of a country station with crossing loop built by the late Ross Hughes.
Aerial view Newmarket Junction. 20
NZ Model Railway Journal September 2018
