Philden Street's curtain call

In the rush to revamp my model railway and completely overhaul this blog early in the New Year, I never really acknowledged just how good a layout I had built and enjoyed operating over the course of the past two years. Of course 2020-2022 will always be remembered as the great Pandemic Panic, and Philden Street Yard emerged during the middle of all these great Aussie Covid lockdowns. But alas, this layout has now been revamped on the other side of it all. So, the question remains... what happened?

Like a lot of good ideas during lockdowns, self-isolation and sudden spurts of what I called modelling time, I had decided to ditch plans to complete my NSW North Coast layout Philden Road, and instead do something a little different. Different turned out to be modelling an inner Melbourne industrial yard, set in the late 1990's to early 2000's era solely because I had two Auscision Models Indigenous NR Class locomotives on pre-order and thought I could combine standard and broad gauge locos on a shelf layout as they effectively run on the same HO scale track. After my Philden Road effort that tried to combine two different rail gauges requiring two separate track arrangements that ultimately cannabalised each other for valuable real estate, the idea seemed brilliant.

So off I went. Selling this and buying that only to find out that I couldn't buy the other thing that I needed, before deciding to convert my layout to DCC sound and ultimately starting over again with another shopping list. This was followed by selling what I had just bought and replacing some of the locos with a sound equipped version of the same model as 1), it was cheaper than fitting an after market DCC chip to the loco and 2), the after market DCC sound chips weren't available due to Covid supply disruptions. It was a time when everyone was spending money on their hobby and paying over-the-top prices thinking they'd never find a sold-out model again.

Philden Street Yard as it was in November 2021 just prior to converting the layout to DCC.

Then just like that the fun was over. Restrictions lifted, borders opened and the Government sent everyone back into to the world to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, rental prices had skyrocketed while our small office cleaning business earnings had plummeted as a result of everyone working from home. I think our last rental increase on the Sunshine Coast was $165 per week. So during 2022 we called stumps on our 14 years on the Sunshine Coast and returned to Brisbane, with my wife starting a new career and myself risking everything to return to a career of writing full-time. Everything suddenly seemed so perfect.

Except that despite almost having Philden Street Yard completed late in 2022, losing my father disrupted my psyche and recalled a lot of baggage that ultimately messed with what I was modelling. In my rush to build a Victorian layout, it seemed I hadn't picked up on the fact that I had been trying to replace my own memories of my parents separating and soon after moving to Victoria, with a model railway. One that was now resurfacing every unpleasant memory whenever I walked into our loungeroom and looked at the layout. It got to the point where it messed with my head for months until early in 2023 I walked in one morning and simply decided that I hated it.

The namesake Philden Street overpass. I never got around to stringing the tram wires.

The problem soon became the amount of money I had sunk into the layout during the Covid years. Given that I had already comitted to writing full-time over the course of 2023 and had a strict budget to keep within, I just couldn't afford to start over again with another layout. So after talking it over with a few people and seeing that it was the backdrop and setting, not the layout itself that was triggering the problem, the backdrop came out rather unceremoniously and I decided to revamp the layout into the NSW North Coast inspired layout I'd originally set out to build with Philden Road.

Since I was mad at myself for the amount of money I'd outlayed throughout the Pandemic years to essentially come full circle, this time I drew up a spartan roster for the new layout. I kept only my two Indigenous NR Class locomotives and my pair of CFCLA ex-NSW locos along with some container and steel wagons, and sold-off everything else. And I mean everything. Any models, books or memorabilia that weren't needed went, and I only replaced them with a pair of Pacific National locomotives for the new layout. I felt that for once the hobby owed me something in return.

The stick-on vinyl lettering could be peeled off without damaging the painted fascia...

...but the gum took some time to continually dab at in order to lift it all off.

Philden Street Yard did however prove to be an ultra reliable layout that was fun to operate. During the course of 2022 I produced 22 YouTube videos on my Philden Street Yard video playlist, sometimes taking days to film, edit and upload each one. Looking back it wasn't time spent wisely, as each of the videos gained only a few hundred views. But still, they're there for anyone to discover in the future.

So this is the last you will ever hear about Philden Street Yard. It leaves behind a legacy of being a YouTube layout rather than an exhibition layout, as once again the amount of money required for me to travel and exhibit a layout like I have done in the past is simply unfeasible at the moment. In its place, my revamped Philden Coast layout becomes the final Australian HO scale layout I shall build. Price-wise I am simply thankful for what I have been able to build and collect, and content to concentrate on writing my final Philden Model Railway books to leave behind my life lessons learned and skills gained for the next generation of modellers to run riot with.

The final signs come down ahead of the layout being revamped and a new backdrop installed.

The layout's revamp and new backdrop provided me with enough surprise material that I am currently in the stage of finishing my next model railway book, a book solely focused on backdrops. So in a nice turn of events, some of my images from Philden Street Yard will be preserved in printed form alongside its replacement. Without doing what I did, the book may never have come about.

I guess it shows that for many modellers, a model railway layout is intrinsically tied to past memories, and those memories predominantly stir-up something whenever we step into the layout room. At the end of the day, my hobby is supposed to be an escape and remain something that I'd like to continually tweak and improve. I can now move on to working on The Coast, and leave the memories of my inner Melbourne industrial layout to hopefully be appreciated in the years to come on my Philden Museum page.

I hope you enjoyed reading a little of this layout's backstory, and I'm sure you'll be able to easily spot the surviving elements on the new layout. It's a case of everything has changed, while very little has changed.