Category Archives: Scenery

Wow!

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While browsing the web, I discovered a great site . It’s called Weston Langford Railway Photography and contains a huge amount of pictures of Australian railway scenes, taken between 1961 and the current day by the well known railway enthusiast, Weston Langford. I did a search on Moreton and found about 20 pictures that were taken on the 22nd of November in 1966. Inspirational stuff for modellers Australian sugar cane railways!

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The image above shows ‘Eudlo’ uncoupling loaded sugar cane trucks near the main line junction, before backing up to take on water at the Bli Bli water tank.

Rows of cane

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Based on the picture in my previous post, I placed some questions about the planting, growing and harvesting of cane. Below you can find the answer of one of the members of the Australian Narrow Gauge Yahoo group … it’s a great story to read and a very helpful guide for sugar cane newbies like me …

cane train

The Farmal M tractor indicates that the scene is set in the ’50s which is when I grew up on a cane farm outside Mackay. Cane growing was a complex and very regulated business but I will keep this brief.

Cane was planted between March and June depending on the wet season that year. In our area the wet season started the last week in January. However no-one, except maybe Lennox Walker, knew if it would last a day, a week, a month, or 5 months.

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Growing Cane

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With regards to railway modelling, summers always tend to be a bit slow … so it’s a good time to browse the web a bit. During one of my searches, I bumped into some great pictures of modelled sugar cane on a Japanese site . It took all my language skills …or better to say, the automatic translation option of Google Chrome to find the the owners of the Japanese layout.

HO scale cane

It is called the Hawaiian Pacific R.R. and I dropped them a note to find out what material they had used to model the HO scale sugar cane. I was very surprised hear that it is artificial grass … and of course it was only available in Japan itself, so I contacted the company that sells the stuff. Unfortunately they didn’t ship outside of Japan, forcing me to find another way to get it shipped home.

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And now for something …

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… completely different! No, I am not going to stop building my Australian layout nor am I putting my Shay on hold. I only decided to do a small project on the side and entered the Eurospoor 2011 diorama contest organised by the Dutch Beneluxspoor forum. 

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Fortunately there are almost no limitations, except that the build area needs to be 100 x 30 cm and that the height is limited to 60 cm. The theme of this HOn30 layout, will be a salmon cannery located in the wilderness of Alaska. As this is my first American build, I decided to but the Revilia Shipping & Storage kit from Bar Mills to be able to experiment with the different building and weathering techniques. The picture above shows my first results and although there is still some room for improvement, I am already quite pleased with it …

A Queensland pub

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As I do not live in Australia myself, I am always on the lookout for Australian layouts that are based on Queensland. They can act as a good example for Queensland structures and scenery. A very interesting S scale (1:64) layout was exhibited at the Brisbane Model Train Show this year.

The pub on the Rosevale layout  
The layout is called Rosevale and is based on the south-east Division of Queensland Rail.  It is set somewhere in the 1950s and contains some great examples of Queensland buildings. I especially like the pub that is based on the Railway Hotel at Imbil and would love achieve this kind of atmosphere on my Koala Creek layout … which will certainly need to have one or more these  pubs on it … 
Watch this YouTube video, if you would like to see more of the Rosevale layout.