New book, new direction

My new book is finally released! Now to channel all that nostalgia into the new layout.

A book launch party for three... Here's a toast to a ten year project!

I wanted to break news of my new book here first. Before the usual trumpeting of such a feat takes on the usual angle on Facebook, or the usual mention is made over on my official author blog at phillipoverton.blogspot.com.au. I'm sure news will follow on these other sites at some point in the next few weeks, but it doesn't seem the norm to break such news accompanied with your own personal thoughts on how producing a book such as this has effected your personal hobby, and vice versa.

I first came up with the idea to do such a project back in 2010/2011 while touring the east coast of Australia with my first two novels. I had just signed what I thought at the time was a good-enough contract with a US based publisher, to take a six month break from working upon the sale of our house, and re-write the entire novel (and sequel which would follow), in American English. Through contacts, I was able to leverage interest in my feel-good beachside fiction to generate a full page article in no less than 29 major regional newspapers up and down Australia's east coast. I thought I was on the verge of having it all, and while travelling through distant towns that I'd only ever heard of but never visited, I would always stop to take photos of any railway stations that we'd come across, and to this day continue to do so.

For a long time, writing, self-promoting and touring had come at the expense of my model railway hobby, and I told myself that one day I would collate all these photographs into a single book, sit back, and build another model railway layout to replace the one I had dismantled shortly after moving to the Sunshine Coast back in 2008. Unfortunately, success never followed. While the sequel to the novel in question was in its final stage of editing, the much-touted book was pulled from sale after only 18 months due to poor sales. And just like that it was all over.

I hope you can appreciate why I can only share something like that here, amongst readers (many of whom I have met or personally email with), whose own modelling skills I admire, and whose criticism I have come to respect. Yet despite the negative overtones in admitting that my writing career never amounted to very much at all, I cleared my head with a train trip to Cairns-and-back before they retired The Sunlander in 2014, and went on to write a further eight, make that nine, railway books in the years that have followed. The model railway layout I suddenly had the time to construct went on to appear on the cover of Australian Model Railway Magazine in 2018, and its' successor has now reached that exciting stage of laying track.

Favourite Australian Railway Stations is available now!

So with the excitement of announcing that my new, full colour, 72 page 8x10" photo book Favourite Australian Railway Stations is now officially available, (pause to take a breath), comes the realisation that this book may very well be my last. I've talked about this often, and arrived at the conclusion that another book can only follow if I have another 10,000 images of entirely different railway stations to sift through in another 10 years time! So for now it is time to take a bow, and leave the stage for someone else to command.

Behind-the-scenes, my nostalgia-filled romp from sifting through countless photos, and recalling the highs and lows of both my writing career and hobby, has greatly shifted the direction that my new layout has morphed into. I don't think it would have been possible for one not to have influenced the other. Even after blogging that I wasn't willing to compromise, came the realisation that in life or a hobby, you must choose what you have when you can't have it all. All those plans I've been blogging about, those ideas of building a split-level bookshelf and even my future model layout ambitions have one thing in common, money. And unfortunately the economic landscape of 2020 is about to change all that for me.

With the year starting with the news of the Coronavirus outbreak, and trade from China greatly effected in the process, I made the call to do a model train shop run to Brisbane with good friend and fellow modeller Anthony. There's nothing like a bit of anxiety-fuelled panic buying to pass the time on a rainy Saturday! We called in at Railco in Deagon before crossing the river to visit Austral Modelcraft in Mount Gravatt. We simply ran out of time to make it the trifecta and visit Aurora Trains as well. With my layout unable to progress any further until I was able to lay the track into position, my wife gifted me $350 from our Christmas fund to get what I needed. Unfortunately there's been a bit of a jump in price since I bought the track for Philden back in 2015. It cost me just under $500 to get everything I needed. So any further purchases are hereby cancelled indefinitely until my model railway budget recovers!

I guess from this point onward, its now a case of being thankful for what you do have, and making the most of what you've got. I'll now reassess where I go from here before commencing any track laying.

It feels great to have the release of my new book out of the way. Its a bit like getting a huge monkey off my back after years of not being able to decide how to lay the book out, or indeed what formula or theme the book should follow. Now that I have something that I am truly pleased with, it sadly also marks the end of an era. All that nostalgia that it has evoked will now see me with only a HO scale representation to follow all those years of work on my book.

Nostalgia. It seems to be the theme for the year so far. From my book, to getting all of my track for the new layout from Ray and Eileen Nunn at Austral Modelcraft, and reminiscing about all those years in between from when I first visited their shop in the mid-1990's. There's just a growing sense of change in the air at the moment surrounding everything. It seems the more we try to keep things the same, the more they seem to change around us, and 2020 has bought us new lows from a summer of storms, bushfires and floods, news of Holden finishing up for good, and uncertainty from a Coronavirus-fuelled economy. When we're so reliant on things coming from China, (insert practically every model train manufacturer here), you begin to feel a bit of anxiety about where our hobby is heading in terms of future pricing and availability. I guess it was just a nice weekend to be able to visit Austral Modelcraft again, and get all the track I needed for the new layout, purely so I can concentrate on stepping back in time with a little bit of nostalgic model railroading for the remainder of the year.