The Golden West

So, what's this photo got to do with the Mudgee Line, quite a bit it turns out, and then again nothing at all. The above photo of a sunset from a beach looking over the ocean is one which I would have thought I might take one day on holidays, but not from a place that I'm working from - why is that, well because I'm based in the Western Sydney area, which is where the Mudgee layout is, but that photo was taken at Scarborough Beach, Perth, Western Australia, just a few K's west of Sydney :-)

A little while ago the company I used to work for made me/my role redundant, unfortunately the only work I could find was based in Perth, the other side of the continent, and I must say though I've only been here for a short while, it is quite a nice place to be, I just hope I get a chance to sample the local modelling scene (Ideas anyone??).

One would think that with redundancy one would have a heap of time to be able to spend on the layout, unfortunately that's not how it's worked out for me, whilst I have been doing a bit of modelling, it's not really been for the Mudgee line (more on that shortly) I have not been able to do anything much on the layout (but I have managed to replace about 2/3rd of the old point motors with the RC Servo based point motors), mainly because of other commitments.

So what have I been doing.

At the last convention at Loftus I saw a demonstration of modifications to the Lima Southern Aurora cars to make them more realistic by a gent named Ian Black, after initial discussions with Ian I decided to have a go at making a 10 car Southern Aurora set, whilst it never ran to Mudgee (except as a preservation tour or three as far as I am aware and even then probably with not all the 'correct' cars) it has been a favourite of mine and I have always wanted to model it, my original intentions was to just have a go at making the power and baggage cars and leave it at that, Allan Brown showed me his models based on the Lima Southern Aurora cars where he lowered the windows to make them more realistic and I thought that would be a good move and discussed with Allan what would be involved in modifying the models, before I started Allan told me about a very good set of models of the Southern Aurora he had seen at the Armidale convention and he thought that whilst there was a fair bit of work involved that they did make up into a very nice set, after seeing Ian's rendition of the Southern Aurora set at the last Loftus convention I decided to have a go. Thus based on Ian's descriptions at the convention and via phone conversations, I have started making my versions based upon Ian's information.

The above photos are of the NAM & RMS, whilst not yet finished (long way to go actually) they have been a lot of fun to get to the stage they are in in the photo, currently I am working on some more LANs, NAMs & DAMs, and have bought some of the models west with me to hopefully continue with.

I'm hoping that whilst I'm working over in Perth that I might be able to do more modelling, time will tell, but if I have anywhere near the amount of free time I think I'll have, I should have the 10 cars finished in about 3 - 4 months.

So whilst the Mudgee line may not be worked on for quite a while from now on, I'm hoping that I will still be able to do some form of modelling in one form or another.

Well that's it for now, so until next time I bid you adieu.

Cheers Alex...