In one of my previous posts, I mentioned  that I was looking for an HOn30 “Class A” Shay from Joe Works. Fortunately one of the members of the Australian Narrow Gauge Railways group read my post and offered me his unbuilt Joe Works, as he had found a KTM Ali Shan Shay himself.

So now I am the lucky owner of a Joe Works “Class A” Shay … well, at least of the parts. I know that it will take some time to assemble, but I will take it one step at a time.
I have already compared the size with the Atlas Shay and have noticed quite some similarities. Although the boiler of the Atlas Shay is tapered, the locations of the domes and stack are exactly the same. So the Joe Works kit will probably also help me to build the Atlas based Shay!

My layout will be set around the 1930s and in those days the sugar cane was still being moved from the nearby fields to the Koala Creek Sugar Mill in little wholestick cane trucks, which were small four wheeled flat wagons with posts on each corner. The wholestick (cane that is cut off at the butt and topped) was just stacked on these small wooden trucks and winched down with a chain to keep the wholestick in place during the ride to the mill. Empty trucks were also used to transport cane cutters from the hotels in Koala Creek to the cane fields.

It will not be possible to create a sugar cane layout without these wholestick trucks and looking at the amount of trucks that are needed, I will probably have to set-up a small production line.

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OK, I am slowly progressing with my quest for a HOn30 “Class A” Shay. As mentioned in my previous post, I will try to kitbash one myself … with a couple of pictures from a Japanese modeler as my main example …
Fortunately I had a bit of luck on eBay last week and won the bid for a couple of bodies of the N-scale Shay made by Atlas. They will allow me to mess around a bit, without destroying a complete Shay …

I compared the body to a drawing of one of the Mapleton Shays and must confess that it looks very promising. The length is almost an exact match and the size of the boiler is also quite  good … the shape is a bit different though.

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Deciding to model the layout in HOn30, will probably make life a bit more difficult … but what’s life without a couple of challenges. So, where to find a “Class A” Shay in HOn30?
Google was helpful again and after browsing a “few” sites, I found the following options.

The first option would be to find a brass Shay that was made by Sugiyama Models in Japan, which were sold in the eighties and nineties under the “Joe Works” or “Flying Zoo” brand … either as a kit or a ready-to-run model. They however are quite rare, which makes them hard to find and a bit expensive. There was one being auctioned on eBay.com this morning and it was sold for 455 U.S. Dollars. Unfortunately I was the second highest bidder …

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