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2019 promises to be a much quieter year. Aside from the pending (and long overdue) release of Last Train to Bunbury, (the third such book in my photographic railway bush poetry series will be out sometime in mid 2019), I've been taking some time out for me. Even to the point of cancelling my planned book appearance on Saturday 9th March at Clifton's 150th Railway Anniversary in South West Queensland. For reasons both personal and logistical, the time and money I would have had to expend to make my being there possible, was going to be another example of the moment asking for a whole lot more than what it was prepared to give in return. Someone once told me that you will reach a point in life where you will know your worth, and after a 2018 that seemed to ask so much of me, I'm enjoying more of the time that I would otherwise have put towards one endless project after another. It's taken me a long time to realise that my books aren't the be-all and end-all of me.

So with a few hundred dollars worth of signed books that were stockpiled for Clifton now at my disposal, I have listed them on eBay for readers wishing to add some of these to their railroad library. There are only half dozen of each title, and the Train Tripping Around Melbourne and Sydney titles always seem to sell out every time I list them on eBay. So first it, first served!

Which brings me to a spot of good news. After much procrastinating, gnashing of teeth and general frustration at how slow these books have been selling, I have now reviewed enough material and photographs taken from my last sojourn south to the Victorian border to decide that a fourth and final installment will follow in 2020. Why 2020? Well, the bad news is that while making my way across outback New South Wales in 2018 to photograph some obscure and out-of-the-way relics from our railway past, I failed to obtain even one suitable photo with yours truly wearing the trusted black hat that has become a staple of my railway adventures so far. So you guessed it, I now have to plan another sojourn south to the Murray River to capture the photo for the cover, and that journey won't happen before mid 2020. Last Train to Sydney will be my fourth and final railway bush poetry book, so expect to see me taking a bow on the cover.

One of the highlights of last year was seeing my HO scale Australian model railway layout featured on the cover of the Australian Model Railway Magazine, all while taking it to no less than four model train shows in South East Queensland. 2019 will see me attend just one exhibition at the Brisbane Model Train Show on the 4th & 5th May at the Brisbane Showgrounds as I construct a new model train layout in 160:1 N scale, with no blogging, no Facebook, no Twitter or Instagram. Just the pure enjoyment of building a model railroad of the Pacific Northwest of the United States for my own satisfaction. Why? Simply because I like the scenery and hope to travel to that part of the world one day to see it in person. For once, my books and everything else that life demands can simply take a back seat to my hobby.

Instead of planning more books for the future, it seems I'm doing the opposite. My first two novels The Long Way Home, and A Walk Before Sunrise will soon disappear from sale. Temporarily of course. In order to plan a way to re-release my first two novels in print sometime in 2020, I want to first be sure that they will have disappeared from every possible sales channel. Through Smashwords.com, the eBooks both filter down through almost every sales channel bar Amazon.com. Making them disappear is anything but an instant click of the mouse, and can take upwards of months at a time for each online sales channel to reprise their listings. Best to get the ball rolling now while things are quiet.

Then there is.... or was, my most recent railway photo book Behind the yellow line. Just four months after release it has already disappeared from sale. Why? Because of an opportunity to create an epic railway book project to take its place in the near future. It's more advantageous to remove the book from sale now, rather than later. We're talking a hardcover, 200 page plus lifetime volume of work that won't come easy, and won't come cheap! It gets back to that whole 'you will know your worth' mantra that I seem to have embraced this year. All I can say is that the book will be out sometime in mid 2021.

Yes, it's still coming. Last Train to Bunbury will be out mid-year!

Which brings me back to Last Train to Bunbury. A book much talked about and long promised since my Western Australia trip back in 2017, that you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a model train pre-order! The thing I've loved about writing these books, is being able to have complete control of the production process. I've captured that sense of nostalgia with each of them that I set out to achieve, and without rushing my latest project, Last Train to Bunbury has only gained an even greater sense of nostalgia in my writing as time has passed since trekking through South West Western Australia. The four collections, for being self-financed and produced, will live on long after I have finished writing them. As will my 10th and final railway book that will cap-off this era of my writing in 2021. For those who haven't yet discovered my writing career, a trip over to phillipoverton.blogspot.com will set you in the right direction, and probably amaze you with the 100 free posts I have compiled over the course of my railway reminiscing years Down Under.

After that? Well who knows. Perhaps by then I would have saved up for that dream holiday to Canada, the US Pacific Northwest and Hawaii. Now wouldn't that be nice. I only have to sell a few thousand more books!

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