Gday All!!
Wow it has been a while since posting here and I do believe its time to get this site up and going again. I have been quite busy during these past 9 months. My house and property in Callignee was destroyed during the Black Saturday bushfires (along with some of my model rail gear and a lot of VR antiques :-( ). We werent in the home at the time and were able to get a small amount of items out.
Directly after the fires, myself and my wife, my 2 children and my parents (who also lost their house) lived in temporary accomodation for 4 months. From there we moved to my parents new purchased home where we lived for 2 months before purchasing a new home of our own. We arent sure whether we will return to Callignee but for the moment we are comfortable and enjoy living in our own space.
Now enough blah blah about sad stuff. MORE ABOUT TRAINS!!!!
I did manage to save all of my N scale models with the exception of a Bachmann Doodlebug (that I was preparing to kit-bash into a VR DERM (Diesel Electric RailMotor)), some decals and the brass etching for my VR K class steam locomotive. I also saved a lot of my VR memoribilia with the exception of the larger (rarer and expensive!!) items such as the original Leongatha ticket cabinet (complete with tickets and all 81 tubes), VR stretcher (rare red one) crossing signals and of course a moderate variety of signs. I have moved on and have started to collect memeroibilia again.
Along with starting collecting again I have also found time and space to start modelling again. :-) I now have a room in the house dedicated to working on the models and a 12x6metre shed for the larger stuff!!
Now onto the topic of my layout plans. I unfortunantly need the shed for other things so it cannot be soley dedicated to a layout and the CEO wont let me build a dedicated layout shed. I would like to keep the general design of the Great Southern Railway layout so have decided to build it in modular form. This opens the capability of taking it to exhibitions (in whole or part) and ability to pack it away should I need the shed for other reasons. I will be editing the former plans incorporating the new adjustments and ill certainly post it here.
On the locomotive and rolling stock side of things I have started ploughing through my box of kits to try and build up my fleet. My main project at the moment has been detailing an Aust-N-Rail ZF guards van. I will outline further details of this in another post.
So for now I will keep this site up to date with all the projects that myself and Paul are working on at the moment and will write about things we have completed.
I will leave you with a picture of the rolling stock I completed detailing yesterday and painted last night (with a big help from Paul).
If you have any question please do not hesitate to contact me
Happy modelling
Adrian
