Capturing memories in miniature

Model railways are really just about re-creating memories in miniature. Whether its childhood memories of trips on trains, a working recreation of a railroad's good-old-days, or in the case of my beach extension, simply capturing the look and feel of era you remember fondly. So fresh back from my Christmas holiday break down south in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, its time to unveil the final stage of my year-long project to turn my two track staging yard... into a two track stand alone scene.

Grafton Railway Station on the NSW North Coast line was the inspiration for the brickwork on my new station.

The far North Coast of New South Wales can be a lonely place for train watching. Most of the steel and intermodal trains either arrive or depart from Brisbane at night, leaving only the Brisbane XPT as the sole train to make a regular appearance in daylight between Coffs Harbour and the border. The Murwillumbah Line is largely overgrown since last seeing a train in 2004, and the Pacific Highway now bypasses many of the towns you once slowed down to drive through. Grafton was always the one railway town you could rely on to spot a train south of the Queensland border while making a highway stop at McDonalds. Not anymore. My last two stops at Grafton have yielded no sight of a train at the sugar silo or station, and once the next 155 km Pacific Highway upgrade between Ballina and Woolgoolga opens in 2020, Grafton will lay well off the highway and Maccas stops will become a thing of the past. So the station building became the first point of inspiration on my station scene. Those memories become part of the scene thanks to my copying the brickwork pattern on the modern railway station.

A flat roof needs something to add some detail, so I added this row of air-conditioner units and a skylight.

With the brickwork and station interior finished, (right down to copying Grafton Station's two strips of dark coloured brick), I found some catalogue pictures of some Daikin roof-mounted air-conditioner units, printed them out, covered them with some clear adhesive film and glued them to a strip of styrene. The mounting brackets are simply unpainted 1/16" styrene rod. I also added a skylight using a painted window frame I salvaged from leftovers from my cement plant I built 3 years ago, proving it pays not to throw anything out.

I next cut and glued the clear styrene windows into place where I'd intentionally left the grey spaces unpainted.

Before giving the roof its final treatment, I sealed the edges so that no glue would ruin the inside detail.

The inspiration for my roof came from our holiday accommodation at Pacific Cove Resort, Coffs Harbour.

I went with something different for the roof of the Travel Centre. Referring to some previous holiday photos from our family trips to Coffs Harbour, I wanted to copy the stone roof effect that is used on the Wyndham Terraces apartments in the Pacific Cove Resort at Coffs Harbour. This was our fifth family holiday to Coffs Harbour and our first one was back in.... you guessed it, 2005. Perhaps this is another reason I chose to set my layout in the 2002-2005 period, and it become the second point of inspiration for my station scene.

The roof stones on the Travel Centre are the same Woodlands Scenics coarse light grey ballast I used on my mainline.

I quite like the finished result. It makes you stop and think, 'where have I seen that before?'

Coffs Harbour Railway Station's large sign, flat roof and air-conditioning structures were my next point of inspiration.

A lot changes in a decade without you realising. Although Coffs Harbour Railway Station on the NSW North Coast Line still looked pretty much the same when I called in over my Christmas 2018 holiday break, the giant Countrylink station sign out the front that I'd photographed above just 4 years earlier in 2014 was gone, replaced by an orange sign with a simple 'T' for train, (as if we didn't already know). It shows how the things we take for granted today can become interesting modelling points for tomorrow. The sign became my third point of inspiration. I simply had to model the blue Countrylink sign on my beach extension.

I made the signs following my own instructions on my post Adding Railway Station signs from back in 2015.

I also added some MIND THE GAP stencilling alongside where the doors of my 2 car Xplorer will pull up.

There is just enough room for me to add a model of a Countrylink road coach when someone decides to release one.

The finished Phills Harbour Countrylink Travel Centre complete with platform and signage.

Trying to photograph the now complete station and platform quickly showed up something I didn't like. Where the backdrop of Coffs Harbour meets the painted blue sky at the end of the line seemed to detract from the overall scene. Revisiting my own post adding the layout backdrop from 2018, I figured I could extend the backdrop scene by matching the mountain line of the photo I'd used as the backdrop on my beach extension. Fortunately, I had a lot of photos I'd taken of Coffs Harbour on that same day, and decided to use one that featured a scene of the Coffs Harbour Marina in the foreground. Returning to Officeworks, this time it cost me only $6.50 to print my re-sized photo on the EZ-Tac adhesive.

The EZ-Tac print was measured, cut and test fit before removing the adhesive backing and pressing it into place.

The extended backdrop instantly improved the scene, but something need to be done about that corner join!

I used these hops plants that I'd purchased from Modellers Warehouse at a model train show.

Gluing them to the height of the tree on either side of the square channel that holds the backdrop in place worked.

The lower waterline on the backdrop makes the railway line look like it ends on a wharf above the marina.

Looking back towards the mouse-hole. I've now turned what was a plain staging shelf into this nice little scene.

So the cleverly named Phills Harbour (coughs) is now complete. The only thing remaining to be done is to add a few lights, to the station building, platform and subway tunnel leading to the beach, and some passengers waiting on the platform and inside the air-conditioned coolness of the Travel Centre for the next train to Sydney. Compare the scene above to the view below of what these two staging tracks once looked like. The two tracks essentially do the same thing they've always done, provide a staging area for trains while I operate the main area of the layout.

Flashback to when these two tracks were simply just staging for my bookshelf layout.

The finished beach extension, ready for opening day!

If model railroading is really just about capturing a memory in miniature, the only person who can really judge the end result is the modeller themselves. Although there was really nothing wrong with the original two track staging shelf, what rebuilding this end of my layout has done is provide my small layout with a lot more memories. Memories of chasing trains along the north coast on the way to our holiday.

See also; Phills Harbour Travel Centre and Adding the layout backdrop

Phills Harbour Travel Centre

Back in the 1990's when Countrylink was rolling out its' new corporate image across New South Wales, some of the key regional railway stations dating back to the steam era were replaced with modern, spacious, brick and air-conditioned structures dubbed as Travel Centres. Grafton, Lismore and Coffs Harbour are three such examples that spring to mind, and the city of Phills Harbour on Philden's Beach Extension is no exception, with the new Countrylink Travel Centre nearing completion opposite the harbour foreshore.

The foundations are embedded into the platform and pressed hard up against the backdrop of Coffs Harbour.

It seems that straightening the beach extension back in July may have been the best decision I made before moving ahead with the new layout extension, as it left me with enough room to build a structure sizeable enough not to be called a building flat. The curved platform and track angle that ends in the corner of the shelf called for the station to be confined to the mouse-hole end of the layout, and having already built the box housing that will hold the structure in place on the platform, it was time to turn my basic plastic kit into something else.

Printed brick paper covered in vinyl adhesive film makes for a shiny-clean tiled floor.

The structure was in fact a cheaply produced convenience store kit bought on eBay and posted from China for less than ten bucks. But as is often the case with bargain-priced anything, you get what you pay for. In this case a plain grey one-coloured shell with no provision for glass window panes. Keeping the floor unattached from the building shell for when I come back to add figurines at a later date, I first covered the interior floor with some self-adhesive printed HO scale brick paper. Being a printed paper surface, I also covered the brick paper with clear self-adhesive plastic book covering to protect the printed surface, trimmed it to size with scissors and stuck it to the floor area. I next used some of the pieces of the kit intended to be the roof mounted sign, to fashion a booking counter and passenger waiting lounge. I also added an interior support column for the roof using a piece of unpainted styrene H channel, and got to work printing some scaled to size vending machines to fill out the waiting room area.

Phills Harbour Travel Centre received a two-tone brick building, similar in design to Grafton Station.

Skinning the building turned out to be an easy and rewarding project, thanks to some 3D printed brick sheets I also found on eBay. Printed on a vinyl-like paper, the bricks had that rough texture and simply need to be cut to shape and glued to the styrene shell using some water based craft glue so as not to leach the colour. To break up the monotony of a plain one-coloured brick wall, I embedded two strips of the self-adhesive printed brick paper (also covered in clear self-adhesive wrap), that I'd trimmed to two brick width heights with scissors. I placed one strip at platform height, and stuck the other nicely between the door frame and below the rear window height, making trimming around the window areas so much easier. For this exercise I put away the ruler, and could simply cut to the nearest brick height, glue and repeat until finished.

The unpainted window and door frames look close enough to aluminium frames.

The shiny brown brick trim contrasts nicely with the rough tan colours of the 3D brickwork, and looks more like glazed decorative tiles. I'd put aside the oversized convenience store fencing, and instead fashioned it into an aluminium awning to wrap around the main corner of the travel centre.

The roof will get some special treatment after I build a row of roof-mounted air-conditioners.

I think everyone knows the type of modern awning I've tried to represent; the stupid architecturally-designed type that protects you from neither the sun or the rain yet seems to lend itself to building designs all the same. Anyway, its there for passengers to complain about when boarding the train.

The test-fit to ensure the travel centre matches its surroundings.

With the outside of the building now skinned in 3D brick paper, I test-fit the building to see how else I could improve its appearance. There was enough 3D brick paper left over for me to do the two inside facing walls, so off the floor came again, and I bricked the inside of the travel centre to the height of the top decorative brown brick trim. I need to glue the window panes to something other than textured paper, so simply left the top of the inside wall an unpainted grey.

The waiting room needed some extra interior details thanks to those big, wide windows!

Before cutting and fixing the Evergreen clear styrene window panes to the main floor to ceiling window areas, I glued my printed vending machines to the back wall. Along with the Coca-Cola, Pepsi Max and Smith's Crisps vending machines, there is also a coffee machine, map of the Sydney Trains network, three Telstra pay phones, an Xplorer poster and some vintage next train destination boards that were fictitiously salvaged from the previous station and put on display inside the new travel centre. I took this photo before adding the window glass so that the interior detail would be more visible. As for the unpainted awning, window and door frames? I'm leaving them that way. I've cleaned enough office windows with my cleaning business to know that aluminium frames look silver-grey.

Phills Harbour Station, with Philden visible through the mouse-hole at the far end of the layout.

Also added to the outside of the building were two almost unnoticeable signs. The one above the door actually says 'waiting room' and 'toilets', complete with the disabled symbol. The other is a photo of the actual Countrylink 'coaches' sign that once stood at this end of my layout when it was just staging. I photographed it, reduced it in size and printed it out before covering them with the clear self-adhesive wrap and gluing it to some card. After trimming it to size I stuck it to the underside of the aluminium awning directing passengers down the ramp towards the waiting road coach connection. It's a nice bit of trivia to have incorporated into my own layout. I now only have to wait for someone to produce a Countrylink road coach in HO scale to park between the platform and the backdrop.

My newly arrived NDFF hoppers drop some ballast on the tracks alongside the new station.

Although the nuts and bolts of the travel centre are now finished, the model is far from complete. I still have to build a row of roof mounted air-conditioning units, a skylight and add the station name signs to the platform before the first 'official' train will arrive at Phills Harbour. So for now, railfans will have to be content with watching Railcorp run ballast trains into the newly constructed platform road. These freshly painted NDFF hoppers arrived only today, and straight out of the box look fantastic. Thanks to flipping some items on eBay and Australian Modeller's 20% Off Black Friday Sale, I was able to add these and some Freightcorp NQYY container wagons and new containers to the layout, so expect to see some more photos of these in action in the near future.

While Phills Harbour is purely a fictitious station, I think I've captured the look and feel of a 90's era Countrylink Travel Centre as I remember them appearing around the turn of this century. With Philden station just visible through the mouse-hole at the far end of the layout, it gives me a decent enough run to shuttle my 2 car Xplorer train back and forth from the outback to the sea. Once I add some lights to the station area and around 20-30 passengers waiting inside for the train to arrive, Phills Harbour will become one exciting little railway station.

See also; Building the Beach Station

Adding the layout backdrop

Finally, thanks to a realistic backdrop, I have transformed my 9' foot bookshelf layout into a slice of outback New South Wales. Gone is the plain blue sky that has been a staple on Philden since the layout first made its public debut, and in its place is the photo that my wife Denise took while travelling back along the Kidman Way past where the rails end at Rankins Springs.

But, as often happens whenever I've tried something different on this layout, it didn't go quite to plan. Thankfully in this case, not being happy with the first attempt pushed me to try again. And as you can see in the above photo, the end result was worth the extra perseverance.

Remember my photo taken at Coffs Harbour?

After preparing the photo backdrop in my previous post, I started first with the background photo I'd taken at Coffs Harbour. This was to replace the blue sky backdrop for the beach extension, that in turn had replaced the simple two track staging shelf that was shown when the layout was featured in the August 2018 edition of Australian Model Railway Magazine. After cropping and sizing the image to have printed at Officeworks, I positioned the finished photo alongside the existing backdrop panel to work out the area I would need to trim.

The bottom of the scene needed some of the wharf detail to be trimmed away.

This photo was taken from the top of Mutton Bird Island, looking west across Coffs Harbour Jetty. As such, it had a lot of detail scene of the jetty in the bottom of the picture that I didn't want showing.

The remaining 1 cm at the bottom would then disappear when slotted into the recessed channel that holds the backdrop.

Knowing that the bottom 10 mm would not be visible once the backdrop was slotted back in place, I left only the tips of some of the jetty light fixtures showing. The idea was to preserve as much of the residential and commercial scene that surround Coffs Harbour Station as possible. When applying the printed EZ-Tac adhesive film to the painted blue backdrop, I used scissors to cut only the bottom and left hand edge of the image. I then had Denise help peel back the film backing as we worked left to right, being careful to be sure the bottom of the image lined up perfectly with the bottom of the backdrop surface. I then turned the backdrop over and used a sharp hobby knife and some scrap board to trim the image flush with the backdrop edge.

I slid the finished backdrop into place on the beach extension for a perfect result. So far so good.

Then I hit a snag with the outback scene that will complete the main layout area. There was some confusion with the sizing chart on Officeworks' website, and my idea of printing 2 x 915 mm x 305 mm sized prints to join together on the 1830 mm long backdrop soon proved to be a disaster. Not only did the two sections look odd on account of the colour difference in both the sky and grasslands from one end of the image to the other, Officeworks' printer actually added a 5 mm white border around the entire image, meaning that the two combined sections were 25 mm too short in length by the time I had applied them from left to right. I know I could have experimented with adding trees or some other kind of structure to disguise the join and the blank area where the image was too short, but being a bit of a perfectionist it just looked horrible.

The first attempt of using 2 x 915 mm length prints to complete the 1830 mm long backdrop was a failure!

Look at the above backdrop join, and you'll appreciate the meaning of the phrase "miss by an inch, miss by a mile."

To this point, the layout backdrop had already added up to $125. Once again, there was some confusion with the online pricing calculator and the in-store costing. A quick explanation for this is that the costing and sizing was for pre-set print sizes, (in much the same way as a K-mart or prints ordered over the counter at a photo lab), but by using a 600 mm wide film they could custom print to my required length of 1830 mm. So long as I factored in the 5 mm white margin that the printer added. I then re-worked my photo to a single image that was 1840 mm long. While some of the foreground took on a slightly blurred look as a result of being re-sized to such a large file size, I was able to mirror-flip the image using Adobe Photoshop Elements 8.0 to enable the open grasslands area to stand opposite the cement plant, while the blurry foreground bush in question then tucked in behind the railway station building out of view.

The extra work was worth the reward. The finished image printed out in a single length of 1822 mm, and despite the printer claiming more than the 5 mm border margin, I was able to cut along the bottom of the picture and simply apply the backdrop from left to right using a 4 mm indentation at either end. Each end of the finished backdrop, (plus the bottom of the image) sits inside the 10 mm deep channel anyway. I then turned the backdrop over, and trimmed the top of the EZ-Tac print flush with top of the backdrop board. The end result? Perfect!

In a nutshell, what I really did was use this formula...

+

 

=

&

The two completely different scenes are separated by the mouse-hole through the underpasses that define each module. While the backdrop colours from my wife's photo taken out-the-back of Rankins Springs match beautifully with the scenery dirts, scatters and grass tufts that I used when constructing Philden, its' the little things that make this backdrop work so well on my finished layout. Details such as aligning the height of the horizon with the brick overpass beside the station, making sure that the height of the foreground trees were above the level of the horizon and the lack of any structure whatsoever on the printed backdrop. While I say that my layout represents the far northwest of New South Wales, and the photo was taken between Hay and Rankins Springs in the far southwest of the state, it is purely a fictitious layout after all. In just wanting to capture the essence of a far-flung corner of the New South Wales Railways' network, I think I've done it well.

The finished backdrops both add an element of depth to my narrow 1 foot wide bookshelf layout.

The beach extension is another thing altogether. It is effectively just a two track staging shelf for the rest of the layout. Only instead of keeping with the black painted shelf with the decorative Countrylink coaches sign that the layout had when it debuted, I have replaced it with a separate scene. After toying with the idea of building this extension as a suburban scene complete with overhead wires or modelling a different era altogether, I settled on building another fictional scene. This time it is Phills Harbour (as opposed to Coffs Harbour), although the backdrop of Coffs Harbour and the much-shortened station or Countrylink Travel Centre as it was known, will be a working reminder of one of my favourite holiday spots.

Although it would have been cheaper for me to have used a commercially available backdrop, (thanks in part to the extra cost of reprinting the larger of the two), I now have a unique backdrop that my wife has contributed to my layout.

The downside is that the cost of printing the backdrops have blown a hole in my model railway budget for the remainder of the year. With the track plan for my next HOn3 1/2 layout still bouncing around from one configuration to another, any work will have to wait until after I return from our Christmas holiday in Coffs Harbour, (yes the real version). Aside from some pre-ordered locomotives I am waiting on (the NSW 442's and 422), there have been a lot of other enticing announcements trumpeted of late that now appear shot to pieces. With the backdrops having transformed my layout, there are a lot of newly announced locos and wagons that I would really like to see running on Philden. I could name four off the top of my head that now appear out of reach if I'm serious about building a second QR narrow gauge layout. But as always with life, there just seems to be too much to do, and too little time to do it!

See also; Preparing the photo backdrop