Finished?

Is a layout ever finished?

Ask any railway modeller and the answer is, "No."

There will always be something to add, a new kit or bit of rolling stock. I could add to my fleet of boats. I might need to repurpose an industry.

After gluing down a few people and little bits here and there, I stood back this afternoon and thought that my work here is done.

I have to say that it has been a whole lot of fun building the layout and writing the blog. Thanks to all who followed and made comments. I'll still be posting here when something happens on the layout.

What next?

I have a couple of things to finish off - such as a station building for a club layout. However, it's time to start on the rest of the layout. The blog for the rest of the layout can be found here: https://sapphirecoastline.blogspot.com/. Why not check it out? The content is about 18 months old at the moment but something new should be added in the next couple of days. In the meantime, have a look at the old posts to find the back story.

Until next time.

Souvenirs

Last Tuesday, I had a fun day out with a mate. We had a ride on the Georgetown Loop Railway, west of Denver in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. It's a short narrow gauge line which winds its way from Georgetown to Silver Plume only a couple of miles away but there is a fair rise in elevation. Silver Plume is 2790 m above sea level. That is an extra half a kilometre on top of Mt Kosciuszko.

Our train was hauled by loco 111 seen below running around it's train at Georgetown. We had travelled over the bridge in the background on the way down.

On our way back to Denver, we stopped off at Golden to visit the Colorado Railroad Museum. Downstairs in the main building is a model railroad by the Denver HO Model Railroad Club. 

Our final stop was Caboose Hobbies, not too far out of the way back to Denver. It was a nice way to end the day. While I was there, I considered buying a couple of items as a way of a souvenir of the trip. Something which I could stick on my layout to remind me of a good day out on the other side of the world.

I admit that I seriously considered a Bachmann Climax with DCC already fitted. If I had a guarantee that it could handle 9 inch curves I probably would have bought it.

Instead I settled on some Woodland Scenics people. HO scale people smuggling takes up less space than a locomotive and is a lot cheaper.

After checking out the different possibilities, I found a small scene of a boy holding up a fish walking to his proud mum, with his dad walking behind him after tying up the boat. I knew a good spot at the marina for this scene. Here it is.

I had to move a couple of other figures around to fit them in but that was a fairly painless task.

I reckon that these souvenirs are a little more fun than trinkets which take up space on a bench next to your telly. Now all I need to do is to find a spot for my Amish carpenters from Pennsylvania.

Until next time.

The Story of the Pink Pig

Lindsay was a member of our model railway club years ago. He was an architectural model maker and ran a workshop on constructing models with styrene. I have to say that from one afternoon, I learned a lot from him. He was a great bloke to have around and he was pretty supportive of other modellers. 

He had built a narrow gauge layout for our club's annual exhibition and it was designed in such a way that it could fit at an angle into his Toyota Camry, with some good padding around the sides. As our club's exhibition had spotter questions for kids to find stuff on layouts, Lindsay decided to hide a pig under a goods platform on his layout, he'd even asked his daughter for advice. His spotter question was, "Where is the pink pig?"

You can probably work out from the past tense used above, things don't end well for Lindsay. He came home from work one afternoon feeling tired and had a sit down on the couch. He nodded off and never woke up.

At his funeral, his story of the pink pig was told. Lindsay was working on his layout in the garage of his house. He had just placed the pink pig into position and called out to his daughter in the house urgently. Thinking something was horribly wrong she raced out to help, expecting the worst. Lindsay was looking at his layout and asked if she thought the pink pig was too hard to find. Words were had but it was agreed that the pig could be seen.

That year, all of the club members displaying layouts put a pink pig on their layout, along with the spotter question to match.

Over the years I've displayed a number of layouts at our club's exhibitions and all of them have had a pink pig on them somewhere. It's just a small thing to remember an old mate. It just seemed right to put a pig on this layout as well. If you see him in some of the photos in future posts, you'll know why he is there.

Until next time.