If only you were in Victoria...

I would gladly help out with the relocation and re-build.  Some extremely nice photos and scenes that you have show, would love to see more before the move and after too.

Jas...

Lets follow a train

Lets follow a train as it makes it's way around the layout:

Ready to leave the port:

Passing the container ship

Rolling over the truss bridge in the newest scene on the layout - the back drop here like all on the layout was hand painted by one of our members: 

Skirting past the 13th Street yard

Pausing at Brown Tank Junction

Passing the Deer Creek depot. 

We leave the train here at Deer Creek. 

More to come shortly....

A couple of in-cab videos

A couple of in-cab videos around the layout..

(Hmm - getting some problems embeding video here - use these links to see the video...)

The big move

Tim:

I hope the upcoming move goes smoothly, and that you can create as magnificent a layout in the new home as you have in the existing one.  Beautiful work; thanks for the tour!

Rog.

The move

A great looking railroad.  Too bad you have to move.

I see a couple things you have to your advantage though.  Younger members and a lot of talented builders.

Good to see so many young faces.  You also get the opportunity to  make changes and corrections to any of the

things you may not like.

I noticed in the video, there are what appear to be turnout actuators under the roadbed.  Haven't seen that type

before.  Could you give us a little info about them. 

I hope all goes well for your group.

Ed

We're not that young...

Hi Ed.

We're not that young - our average age is probably at about the 55 mark - something like 1/3 of our members are retired or are about to retire.  We do have a variety of skills in our group.  Some are better with the benchwork and tracklaying, others electrical and others do well in scenery.  

Unfortunately our backdrop painter has resigned from the club due to health reasons so we are going to have to work out an alternative.

Turnouts on the layout are thrown by 2 main methods - we use Tortoise machines on all the main line turnouts.  Yard and siding turnouts are thrown by a wire in tube method using R/C gear. All the turnouts are Peco which have a built in spring to keep the blades in position (we did remove those springs when installing the Tortoise machines as they have a tendency to make the point rails snap over in a unrealistic fashion ).   

Regards

Layout

What a shame. I hope you can find a more permanent place for the future layout.

Take care and Good Luck.

Rob Teed

Good luck with your move. It

Good luck with your move. It can be done. Our club moved several years ago, and it has been with great results. We now have a bigger layout with more room to grow. Not to mention it is on the first floor now instead of the second.

Alan

Demountable Benchwork

Continuity is one of the things that appeals strongly to me in our hobby.  I've been working on a Campbell kit that was first designed in the mid seventies (my kit which I bought on Ebay was probably produced in the early nineties) and here it is in 2011 and it's a totally fresh experience.

Thus I think more thought should be put into designing demountable bench work as the onset and thus save the anguish of destroying hundreds of hours of good work when the need to move arises.

I think that Dick Elwell's totally successful salvage, move and recreation of his excellent pike can be an inspiration to us all.  The trick I suppose is is to make our work worth saving.  So far I'm just not there yet.