And now for something …

Posted on November 28, 2010 by Koala Creek

… 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.

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 …

Without words …

Posted on November 7, 2010 by Koala Creek

I always try to focus on one project at a time, unfortunately I can not help myself to start thinking about the next one already …
My converted Shays will of course run on the tramway itself. I will however also need some engines for the Sugar Mill itself, so I started looking for information about the Fowlers that were operated by the Moreton Central Sugar Mill in Nambour.

That’s when I ran in to Peter Bruce’s Railfan Blog, with some great pictures of the daily operations at the Moreton Mill in 1962.
One of the pictures on his blog has the out of service Shay in the background … and Bruce even promises to show more pictures of the Shay in his next post … I am looking forward to that one!
I have added smaller versions of the pictures at the end of this post, just click on the link below to see them. The original and larger pictures can be found on Bruce’s Blog.

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Cabin Fever

Posted on October 25, 2010 by Koala Creek

Time sure flies when you’re having fun … it’s already been two and half months , since my last post on the HOn30 Shay. I know that I have a couple of followers out there who are waiting for an update, so here we go …
Another set of parts arrived from Printapart last Friday and after a quick test-fit, I refitted the entire body to Shay version 0.2.

To start with, the diamond shaped smoke stack is now 1 mm taller and I remodelled some details on the headlights which did not print that well. I also remodelled the right-hand side by changing the height of the piston cover and by adding HO scale pistons. Furthermore, part of the N-scale piston cover has been hidden beneath a toolbox, making it less wide and giving it the look & feel of the original. And last, but not least … the little bugger finally received it’s cabin!

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It’s all for free!

Posted on September 22, 2010 by Koala Creek

Please note that I have removed the download pages for the mentioned parts, as they were hardly being used.

As part of my modelling efforts for Koala Creek, I have created several HOn30 parts. These parts have been modelled in 3D CAD software and have been exported to STL file format, allowing them to be printed by a 3D-printing service like Printapart.com. The great thing about this way of modelling is that once the STL file has been created, one would be able to print an infinite amount of copies of a part.

I however do not believe that I will be needing that many parts for Koala Creek … nor do I have any intention of selling the parts commercially. So I decided to share my modelling efforts, by making the STL files of the parts available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

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So, what’s next?

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Koala Creek

Just noticed that my last post was over a month ago, so it is definitely time for a quick update. As mentioned in my previously, I was not that pleased with the shape & size of the piston cover, so I have been trying to reshape it in my 3D-model. Believe I am almost there, but it also requires modelling new and larger pistons … and it takes some time to make them look good.

I also received “The Mapleton Tramway” by John Knowles, a great book that includes a detailed description of the route and gives an interesting insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the little Shays. Train operations are described, including the excursions operated at weekends which connected with QR trains.
An interesting feature of the line was the private siding to the general store at Mapleton, where goods were unloaded from the daily tram across the store veranda.

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