A Little Train Show

Last weekend, after an 'absence' of several years, I helped run one of the Model Railway layouts working at our Little Train Show. Over the years I have travelled with layouts, my own and club layouts to Invercargil, Timaru and Christchurch to help provide a better show than just what the 'local guys' can come up with. Layouts which because of the originator's own ideas are a little different.

I do this principly to help raise funds for the host club but the thing I remember most is the happy faces of children as they are introduced to the idea of model trains, the sheer enjoyment as they either stand on chairs to look at layouts wrongly designed for the operator's convienience, or else held in the arms of Dad or Mum, or often this year it was grandma and grand dad, I guess mum and dad working to make ends meet or just to have a little rest from the kids.

One of the problems of course is the wish all children have to TOUCH and this is a NO NO as far as modellers are concerned, the trains are expensive and easilly de-railed, the layouts the result of many hours of painstaking work. Some years ago our club was given a sheet of plywood onto which a scale image of a railway had been pasted. I organised legs and edging and laid three rings of track to match the image. Other clued up members built a triple control system with separate timers for each circuit. The first few years we ran this we charged/asked for a 50c donation with total proceeds going to a child charity. These days, years, it is just open slather as the kids roll up.

As far as touching most children are pretty good and understand the 'no touch' rule. Perhaps they have not learnt to dis-obey their guardians. I remember one little boy, happilly standing taking in the layout I was running. I was obviously just a little nervous and kept an eye on him, out of the corner of my eye etc. But he didn't touch UNTIL! Grandma came back and in his enthusiasm he pointed to something on the layout ... WHAM ... grandma's hand came down on his. I was very sad at this un-needed smack.

Another time I was running a railway at "Santa's Cave" and an older boy put something on the track .. silly idiot he didn't look around to a few feet away I was keeping an eye on things. I just coughed, or something like that, and he looked up at me and promptly removed the stick or something he had placed on the track.

But these are isolated cases from hours of running.

While a lot of club members come along every week to run their trains on club layouts, clubs do not have many or any trains of their own, for others it is the creating of a miniature piuece of railwayania which is the main point of their interest and keep on adding to layouts until there is nothing more to do, whereupon they start building another. I guess I fall into that later group and only run for the benefit of the Club.

Visitors to this site

Thank you for bothing to let me know that you visited BLiP and Patricia. I note your baseline Patricia and one of my continuing hobbies is Model Engineering which started here in Otago with OO trains. Built an 8x4ft layout for my son and my wife said it had to be capable of being operated by him and his best freind. So I was dumped in from the start with double pole switches to assign sections to a pair of controllers and then reverse loops. But because my lawyer invited me up to his home to see his layout I got a thing about being as close to scale as possible and I found that the Darjelling Railway, 2ft gauge, has a 50ft radius curve, which is quite possible when working in OO9. So I am I guess a 'narrow gauge nut' from the '70's:-)

Otago Model Engineering of which I have been a member for thirty years plus now has three basic groups and to break the 'monotony' of one discipline members do other things so I have a workshop and owned for awhile a 5" gauge electric loco ... carefully modelled on a shunter from the East African Railways ... so far away no rivet counter could see what I had done wrong.

At the same time I am also 'into boats' with various successful and not so succesful radio controlled craft. Awhile back the Boat Group made a 'run' of 22 quarter-scale jet boats. Each participating member had a job to do 22 times. Not being very skilled I spoke up quickly and got the job of making the motor mountings, first making jigs to ensure each of the 8x22 bits were standard. Others has much more difficult jobs such as converting the air cooled weed-eater 30cc petrol motors from air to water cooled. Another job was casting in aluminium the actual jet drives. Subsequently some have added a working reversing shell like the prototypes have to reverse the boat. This drops down and sends the thrust of water forwards under the boat. The completed boat has driver and co-driver modelled and dressed appropriately

Currently I seem to be back into OO9 and N gauge. The advantage of being in a club with numerous layouts is that one doesn't have to find room to have one at home. There is a fixed OO/HO/S scale layout, The latest N layout which fits a 6x4ft trailer with it's storage frame to hold the three sections. We are having a 'Little Train Show' next weekend 29-30 August and other layouts have been modified from our OO and N portable layouts. We also have a drive yourself for the children of any age.

That N layout used to be a 26 module to international standards and toured around the country ... originally parts seen in Auckland but other times normally in Invercargil and Christchurch. Supposedly NZR in 1/120 scale [ NZ120 ] inspired by the late John Rappard but with his passing it is just an N layout.