Philden Road Part Six

...or the one about the summer of painting the layout.

Well, Twenty-twenty is well and truly underway. And by that I mean the year 2020 and not the cricket variety. Although the KFC Big Bash is a welcome way to cool down in the evening in front of the telly after a day at the beach or painting some layout benchwork in the garage! Ironic then that the team I follow happens to be the Brisbane Heat.

This year's edition of summer in Australia has been hot. Days hitting 39 degrees Celcius in Queensland, and none that I can recal dipping below 30 degrees. Which is not a problem when you live on the Sunshine Coast and can be parked at the beach and in the water in only 10 minutes. But while we are still waiting on word of when the repairs to our house will commence following November's freak hail storm that I covered in Philden Road Part Four, at least we have a roof over our heads. Unlike many Australians throughout Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia who no longer have a home, thanks to the worst bushfire season I can recall. When you factor in loss of livestock, livelihoods and the complete devestation of some historic Aussie towns, the road to recovery for many communities is going to be a long one indeed, and it remains to be seen what impact the fires have had on our railway lines in the affected areas.

It was a slow process painting one side of each benchwork section at a time.

Back to my new layout news, and after returning from the beach this morning from my umpteenth swim of the summer, my wife helped me apply the final coat of paint to my benchwork frame. I had to enlist Denise's help with painting the layout on a sheet of cardboard on my garage floor on account of my knee still needing time to recover from the small procedure I had on it in early December. While I'm back moving around without any pain and with more range of movement in the knee than I've had for the past six years, bending down on a concrete floor for twenty minutes at a time was proving a painful exercise. Between us we'd paint one side of the leg frames and top sections, leave it standing against the wall for the day to dry, and the next morning repeat the process on the other side. It took two days to apply each coat of paint.

I used an undercoat when painting the benchwork frame, as I want the finished layout have a furniture-like finish.

I used a 100 ml can of White Knight Splashes water-based undercoat, and a 250 ml can of the White Knight Splashes water-based gloss white to paint the entire benchwork. I applied 1 coat of undercoat and 3 coats of the gloss white to the entire framework. and then took the time to lightly sandpaper the visible outer sides of the framework and apply a further 2 coats. The famework will now lean against our garage wall for the next week to harden before I re-drill the bolt holes and assemble the framework above my desk area next weekend.

The final coat applied to the five sections that will bolt back together to form the benchwork.

Finally after 6 months of frustration, I'll have a visual scope of the size that the new bookshelf layout will be. I can then get to work building the two separate modules that will sit on top of it. It might seem like going about things the long way, but if I ever decide to build another layout down the track, I only need to rebuild or replace one module at a time, and the free-standing framework will never need to be rebuilt. After retiring Philden from the exhibition circuit and stripping the layout bare, I think building the new layout this way will turn out to be a brilliant idea.

One thing I have been pleased with so far compared to when I built Philden, is that painting the layout has proven to be a whole lot easier than using a stain and varnish. There's no problem with trying to match stains when you're just painting it white to match in with my IKEA furniture that will stand beneath it.

So with holidays now officially over for me, and my knee now ready-enough to carefully return to work, I'm hoping the positive mindset of finally making some progress with the layout will continue throughout the year. Despite not getting anywhere near the amount of work done on the layout that I thought I would when we decided to holiday at home this Christmas Holidays, we're all safe and I'll soon have the skeleton of the new layout standing in our living area. Then I can roll out my plans and start cutting some plywood. I've spent the past 18 months assembling a new locomotive and rollingstock fleet, and can't wait to get them running on track so I can start shooting some photos of them for this blog.

Until next time, stay safe, and if you're not in a position to give financially to any of the bushfire appeals that are now running, then please keep our great country in your prayers. We've been coping with bushfires, floods and cyclones since before Dorothea Mackellar wrote the words 'I love a sunburnt country'. So no matter what your thoughts are on climate change, leaders and social media influencers whipping people into a frenzy... take a deep breath... and think of how you can lend a hand rather than where you can point a finger. There's probably quite a few model railway layouts in houses or back sheds that are sadly no more because of this summer. When the time comes, maybe you'll know of someone nearby you can help start over with their new layout. Trust me, it can be quite the rewarding feeling.

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.