Philden Road Part Four

...or the one about bad knees, bad luck and the badass hail storm.

Sometimes things that have absolutely nothing to do with model railroading just seem to find a way of halting progress on your layout, despite your best attempts to do otherwise. In a week when a doctor's appointment following a brush with a little old lady at the supermarket checkout revealed I have further aggravated some quadricep ligament damage in my right knee, (simply from changing the direction of my step at the last minute to avoid possibly knocking her over), Sunday afternoon's recovery session from my son's engagement party the night before soon turned into the hail storm from hell.

Hail storm, Aura estate, Sunshine Coast, Sunday 17 November 2019.

An afternoon on the front patio with a glass of bubbly whilst watching a summer storm roll in over the suburbs of Caloundra, quickly turned into a hobbled dash by Dad to bring my son's car up onto the patio to avoid getting any hail damage. By the time I closed the driver's door behind me, golf ball sized hail stones began pelting me and our entire street with a defeaning roar.

Hail storm damage, Caloundra West, Sunshine Coast, Sunday 17 November 2019.

Not content to pelt the side of my son's car anyway, the storm let loose on the front of our house, leaving the garage door dimpled and punching holes in the concrete rendering on the front of the house. Once inside, frantic calls from my son and his fiance quickly had me hobbling upstairs behind my wife to discover that 3 of the 4 upstairs windows in our bedroom were smashed, and we now had hail the size of golf balls bouncing off our bed and out into the hallway.

Free air-conditioning courtesy of a monster hailstorm that belted our suburb in Caloundra.

By the time we could grab all the buckets and towels we could find, our bed and bedroom furniture were soaked and the full force of the storm had the blinds flapping and everyone was getting struck by inward coming hailstones while stepping over broken glass to try and rescue... You guessed it. Dad's model trains which were stored under the bed.

No it wasn't a drive-by shooting by the mafia, just a Queensland summer hail storm. Sunshine Coast, 17 Nov 2019.

The hail storm was the most badass I've ever experienced, and while I was kneeling down passing my model train boxes and prized XPT set to my son to run downstairs to safety for me, his fiance and my wife were filling buckets and the esky with incoming hail stones and carefully picking up large pieces of broken glass which filled another bucket. Then just like that it was over. A bit of light rain followed, (enough to further soak the carpet), then the sun came out. And so did the gawkers, Instagramers and YouTubers who soon congregated in front of our house.

They don't build houses like they used to. What you think is concrete rendered brick turns out is just concrete papier-mache.

I think we must have been close to the worst hit house in the street, but due to the angle the storm came from and the angle our house faces the road, our house seemed to be the easiest to film. I checked on the elderly lady next door who said both she and her house were fine, and then spent the rest of the afternoon and evening cleaning up the mess. Glass all over the floor and bedding, bedside lamps and furniture all wet and needing to be wiped down and wet model train boxes waiting for me to see to. I guess it's just bad luck that the models and other train stuff that I was selling on eBay were all safely stacked by my desk downstairs waiting to be sold and posted, while my prized models for the new layout were all wet underneath our bed upstairs. The boxes ended up being slightly water damaged, but all the models inside appear to be fine. I guess I should be thankful for small mercies.

My wife Denise was fantastic, and together we had Gaffa-taped the windows with black garbage bags and booked an emergency window repair call-out while the neighbourhood continued to just mill about and walk around filming everything on their iPhones. By eight o'clock that night O'Brien glass had replaced the three broken windows, and I could then move all the furniture to vacuum the entire room and hallway on my hands and knees to ensure not even the tiniest speck of glass remained in the carpet, (broken glass has long been my pet phobia). Denise and I finally put all the bedroom furniture back in place around half past ten, and fell into bed exhausted.

Bad knees, bad luck and one helluva badass storm!

All I wanted to do today was work on my layout benchwork.

Today was supposed to be a free Monday for me to work on the layout. Instead, I thought I'd take Denise out to the Coffee Club down by Bulcock Beach in Caloundra for breakfast. All four of us were amazing when it came to securing the house and cleaning up so quickly, and driving out of our estate the morning after, the roads around Aura were lined with hail damaged cars, more houses with broken windows taped up with cardboard boxes or bags and so-called brick rendered houses littered with gunshot holes. Maybe there's a lesson in there for us model railroaders; nail some blue plastic netting over the top of silver insulation paper, smear it with 3 mm of concrete render, paint it and call it a brick rendered home. It's disgusting the corners people cut to save money yet charge the prices they do for new homes. I've built HO scale model train buildings that are stronger.

Anyway, we enjoyed the peace and quiet of a Monday morning down by a near deserted Bulcock Beach, while back in our estate tow trucks spent all day towing away vehicles with shattered windscreens and trying to sqeeze down ridiculously narrow streets past tradies' utes and glass repair trucks. Although my son's car did get some hail damage down the driver's side door panels, my quick actions at least saved his car from being declared unroadworthy. At least he can still drive it around while we decide what to do about repairing it, given there is a huge excess on the young guy's insurance and he now has a wedding to save up for.

Back at our place, the landlord arranged a building inspection this afternoon and apparently the colourbond roof is so badly beaten up and bent out of shape that the entire roof of the two storied home will have to be replaced. Sometime in the next few months. Meanwhile there is a two day wait for a call-out if you want your window repaired on the Sunshine Coast. Moral of the story; fix it first before you Facebook it!

So, with the bad luck and badass storm now out of the way, an MRI scan this week will determine what course of action to take with my knee. Fortunately our business will soon start winding down towards the Christmas break which should ease our workload, but when I had three weeks planned of simply being at home to work on the new layout, I'm still hoping I somehow get a chance to get the benchwork finished, painted and set up above the desk to start work on the layout itself instead of being told to rest up. I guess I'll learn my fate over the coming week.

Anyway, next post I'll share some good news from my son's engagement party, give an update of all things N scale and reveal the meaning behind the name of my Canadian layout. But as usual, I'll let that be a story for another day.

Till next time, keep smiling, otherwise the world will send you crazy.

Philden Road Part Three

...or the one about getting the benchwork right before thinking about anything else.

Its all too easy to get carried away with thoughts of what you're going to incorporate into a new layout without first drawing some kind of plan. Blindly knocking a frame together may seem like a great place to start, but without knowing the length of layout area you have to work with, any track plan you conjure up can easily become a waste of time. Before I dared draw a plan or cut a length of timber for the new layout, I had to first work out how much room I had to display the layout and more importantly how I would transport it if I were to ever again take a layout to a model train show.

Despite having more room in our new surrounds than the small waterfront apartment that Philden once occupied, we are planning to upgrade our car in the coming year, and the last thing I wanted was for the layout to dictate what size car we could buy, or the car to dictate whether the layout could ever be taken on the road. You see, Philden was 1880 mm long, with another 800 mm of staging that later became the Beach Extension, making for a total length of 2.62 metres. Taking Philden on the road called for the front seats to be moved forward to fit the 1.88 metre long section in the back of our Ford Mondeo, making for a less than comfortable trip wherever we took the layout. Chances are that the new car might be shorter than the Mondeo.

Incorporating two distinct scenes on Philden Road called for the new layout to be longer and wider, while still being able to fit into the back of a mid-sized car with the back seats folded flat. Working on the premise of the boot access of any half decent mid-sized car being at least 900 mm wide and 1.65 metres long, I settled on building the benchwork for the new layout in two 1650 mm x 450 mm sections, giving me a total layout length of 3.3 metres and width of 450 mm. While it is longer and wider than Philden, the new layout will be much easier to fit into our current car, and less of an issue when it comes time to shop for its' vehicular replacement.

Its funny how the settled dimensions of a new layout then have a ripple effect on the rest of the decision making process. The trackplan then has to fit the active scenic areas of the layout, the active scenic area then determines the length of your sidings, and the length of your sidings then dictates what length trains you can run. With the benchwork construction progressing nicely, I could get back to thinking about everything else; the rollingstock, the structures and the topography of the scenery I wished to create. Even with more layout space to work with, surprisingly there still isn't a swathe of space to fill with structures or sidings to fill with rollingstock.

The still under construction benchwork for Philden Road is taking place in the garage.

I suppose what I got from that recognition, is that I didn't need a large amount of wagons to fill out the roster on the new layout. In fact, I still had a little too much in terms of the amount of same-type, different-numbered wagons. Which is fine by me, as I could just list them on Ebay and turn them into some more cash.

What getting the benchwork dimensions right highlighted, was just how much of our living area would be taken up by this and my Candian Canyon N scale layout that will ultimately rest beneath it. Plans for any other small layout projects I was conjuring up would honestly only be a waste of time.

I think it goes to highlight that no matter how grand your plans may be, its more important to get your benchwork right before thinking about anything else. Its strange how the new layout now seems to be taking on a less is best mentality. Fewer sidings, fewer structures and fewer rollingstock. What it does allow for, is leaving more scenic areas between key scenes, something of which I've been studying a lot of lately on other people's layouts. But until I finish sanding, painting and assembling the new benchwork, I'll let that be a story for another day.

End of the line...

What took the best part of two years to complete took less than a day to salvage, dismantle and ultimately reduce to the pile of scrap you see above. I suppose with it comes a sense of finality, that Philden has indeed reached the end of the line. Unable to sell the layout by the close of its final public showing at this year's Brisbane Model Train Show, and ahead of moving house, a week later I made the call to strip the layout of its usable parts and pack away the buildings into some small storage boxes in case called upon in years to come. Finally, I cut the timber-work into pieces small enough to shove into a wheelie bin.

I managed to save the timber decking in one piece to re-use on a later layout.

The goods shed and railway station building were made to be removable, as such never went back onto the layout following pack-up from the Brisbane Show. The scratch-built timber deck for the goods shed however needed to be cut away from its balsa wood foundations. I found a long-bladed hobby knife extended to full length was enough to gently slice back and forth until it came free without damage. I intend to re-use the goods shed and timber deck with some slight alterations on my next layout.

The exhibitor plaques and station memorabilia were all able to be removed from their adhesive tape backing.

Having kept the beach extension section of my layout to convert into a display case, I really wanted to salvage the exhibitor plaques and railway memorabilia that decorated the timber fascia on the layout. Fortunately they were all applied with either double-sided adhesive tape, or had been screwed and glued using a few blobs of clear silicone adhesive. It took some time to use the same extended hobby knife to shimmy them free, but they came away without any damage. After cleaning the tape residue from the back of each one, are all now safely packed away, ready to be re-mounted and displayed on the next layout.

Trees, buildings, signs and whatever else could be salvaged for my bits-and-bobs box came next.

Unlike the station and goods shed, the cement plant and signal box were glued firmly into position. To remove the signal box I first saturated the area around it with soapy dish wash liquid, and used a stiff knife to cut around the edge of the foundations and pry the little building away in one section. It suffered only a little damage to the base beneath the stairwell, something which will easily be hidden with some ballast when next gluing it alongside the railway tracks. The cement plant however was fused to the plywood base from a combination of balsa cement and PVA white glue which had managed to seep between the scenery and the base of the building. It finally came free after a cracking sound followed by a light shower of tiny handrails that came loose from the tower feeder and top of the silo. I'll need to make some repairs with some plastic cement if it were to be re-used in the future.

Before cutting the layout into scrap sized pieces, I removed all wires and steel hooks from beneath, and made cuts through the track where I would run a jigsaw through the baseboard. With the rail joints all soldered and the points all heavily ballasted right up to the delicate switchblades, I decided against wasting any further time trying to soak, cut and pry the few turnouts loose from the layout. Finally, my wife Denise and I carried the six foot long section of layout down the stairs for the final time, and the jigsaw took care of the rest.

Another former layout destined for the dump.

Cutting up a layout isn't a fun feeling. But neither was not being able to sell it. I'm now two from four when it comes to selling completed layouts, and it seems the bigger they are, the harder they are to sell. With the layout no longer standing in our apartment, and moving boxes quickly beginning to accumulate, the excitement about building the next one strangely isn't there. I guess its going to take getting the house move out of the way first to see if it returns.

As always when faced with starting over, there's usually a list of notes as to what you would do better or differently next time. Building this layout has left me with plenty of ideas.

A model railway market that is so niche as Australia has never had it better. Thanks to trailblazers in the hobby who 20 years ago pioneered ready-to-run accurate plastic models of Australian trains, I do believe we are enjoying a golden era of model railways in Australia. Yet as everything quickly becomes DCC, sound equipped, more highly detailed and expensive than ever before, I wonder where the jumping off point will come for those in the hobby. Like real estate, there eventually comes a point where the average Joe simply can't afford to build that dream model railroad anymore. What happens then? Well, I hope that I've managed to offer something to the hobby in showing that a small bookshelf layout can still offer an alternative that's at least better than nothing!

While I've toyed with the idea of starting another blog to outline my next layout, ultimately I decided not to. In the four years that I've documented Philden's construction and progress, my own author blog over at phillipoverton.blogspot.com.au has fallen by the wayside. I've more books to write, promote and generate sales for, and despite the railway books I've published over the past few years, a blog such as this sends very little traffic the way of my book sites. Another how-to model railway blog only seems like more of the same, and my time has since become very precious to me. Especially if I'm going to balance writing that elusive New York Times Bestselling novel and trying to finish my next Aussie model railway layout. So why not follow it instead? I'll soon be once more concentrating on sharing my Lineside Liaisons posts featuring the railway photography from my current and forthcoming books. And I promise I won't make you pre-order any of them!

May 2019, and the curtains come down on a layout that has been a pleasure to build and operate. Adieu!

So I've arrived at the end of the line. The part where I thank all who have taken the time to read and follow the goings-on of a layout that satisfied my desire to build a HO scale Australian outline model railroad after 30 years of modelling U.S. N scale. Along the way I've shared what has worked, and what hasn't. For all the nice comments on this blog I say thank you. To everyone who enjoyed seeing it in person at a model railway exhibition, I hope it gave you some entertainment value. To the rude bloke at the Gold Coast Show in 2017 who commented that it was a waste of space and shouldn't even be there, I say Ppphhhlllttt!!!

Any layout comes with its own unique challenges, and taking this layout to no less than 8 model train shows when there were 5 flights of stairs to go down when I left, and the same 5 flights of stairs to lug it back up when I returned was my greatest challenge. To that I'm forever grateful to my wife Denise. Having her beside me at each model train made this 'our' layout. And strangely enough, long after I've sold off all the models that won't be making their way onto my next layout, her collection of Swarovski earings that I bought her as a reward for each model train exhibition we did will live on as a lasting reminder of how much fun we turned this into.

And finally, what does one do with a blog about a model railroad that no longer exists? My guess is you do nothing. Much like the books I've written in the past, I'll just let this blog be, and hope that it gets discovered or re-discovered by other model train enthusiasts in the years to come. Hopefully I've left behind some helpful insights into how you too can build a nice bookshelf layout such as Philden.

Why did I do it? Because I love the hobby, and I'm sure I'll be back at an exhibition soon with a new layout to share.

Cheers,
Phillip O

See also; Exhibiton #8 Brisbane Finale