Confessions of a Model railway Junkie

Written by Burn

Train Confessions

Yep thats me and i'm in need of a fix again,living in a small 2 bedroom house , with a small second bedroom room being used for the pug holding facility till we get a warehouse (lol) that also contains a model Railway half of which is set up and another half in pieces under it obscured by ironing boards bicycle parts boxes of cd's albums and t shirts and about 500 books , how we manage to close the door I will never know .

But It's still called the train room so part of me tells me it's time to make the trains runs again .

Let's start from the begining, as a little child I have fond memories of going to my Grandfather Joes shop at lillyfield and look at all the Trains and goods yards around there,Steam was just dead at this stage but every thing was covered in black dust and was very grimey,the stuff that little boys love haha.A little family history - my Mother worked on the railways in country and coastal New South Wales on express trains with wonderfull names like the North coast mail,The Daylight express,The Central west express and other names gone by , My other grandfather Tom or Jock as he was known was from Kempsey on the NSW north and remembers the first train at telegraph point when he was a youngster and was later a Tram conducter in Sydney when we had the 2nd largest tram network in the Empire (try finding a trace of it now ). And of course I now work for the NSW Railway as a signaller but funnily enough when I was interviewed for the job and was asked if I had any Railcorp or former NSW Rail employee'e in my family none came to mind , only that i enjoyed building and running a model railway ! strange but true...... 

So I have cleared a path through the debris to the layout and cleared away the spider webs and wiped the tracks down , switching the power on reveals the lights in all the little house's and buildings still work putting a nice glow to the situation which always reminds me of christmas for some reason and turn the controller on put a de dusted locomotive on the tracks and.......nothing damn it ! it has been to long so more cleaning of tracks putting oil on the loco's engine wiping it all down and we are off for the first circuit , only 20 minutes and all is up and running what a relaxing way to spend a Saturday afternoon, so I make plans to clean more locomotives re glue the broken bits from my last family visit to fix all the detail the kids have broken , which is no bother I do not see the point of doing this if i'm going to be upset when a 4 yo snaps a tree or puts a car on the track in front of a train , I would have done the same thing at there age lol ! . besides there are enough cranky cunts in this world..... 

to be cont'd.....

 So a little model train background I model German railways which I think are the coolest railway in the world , Marklin the brand I model was the first company I the world to produce model trains and the best but I am biased , but hey I have models from 1955 retro fitted with digital decoders from 2008 and they run fantastic I run AC powered 3 rail rather then the more conventional DC 2 rail , and model HO scale which is a good allround size , not to small and not to bigand most of the models are made of die cast metal so they survive visits from young nephews and friends kids ,any way here is a link to the world of Marklin.

If you reckon Punk's / skinheads are hardcore they have nothing on the model train community I have met people with $500 000 collections , freaks that design their houses around the train room and have even seen layouts that run through tunnels under the house circle round the dunny in a perspex tube just to make a connection , I have seen fights over prototype modeling that have divided internet communities me ? well i'm not that serious about it but understand where they are coming from , they are a weird mob indeed......