The accompanying Blog represents my personal ideas on the model railway hobby and my layout "Brolgan Road".

  • There is no guarantee that any of my ideas are right!

  • I am a jack of all trades and master of none.

  • The topics are mostly illustrated with photos (a picture is supposedly worth thousand words?).

  • The main objective of the blog is to share information, so hopefully it will be of some use to other modellers.

  • Brolgan Road is a corruption of the name of the small station Brolgan on the Western Line between Parkes and Broken Hill. It was the second 'station' from Parkes and was close to Goobang Signal Box near where we lived, although long gone now.

  • I grew up in the steam era on the outskirts of Sydney in the late 1940s through to 1965 and our family had no car so holiday travel was mostly via steam train. In my early days the future Roselands shopping centre was a dairy and almost all items were delivered by horse and cart. That included bread, ice, milk, clothes props, rabbits (for eating) and general produce although one of the produce stores had a 1920s Chev truck ... very advanced. The western outskirts of Sydney at that time was quite bushy with lots of empty paddocks and scattered housing. It was not unusual to see emus in the park around the velodrome (wood surfaced bike track) at Wiley Park oval.

  • Travel to high school at Homebush was by electric train, still with many wooden carriages and passing a multitude of steam hauled goods and passenger trains. The Flemington sale yards were a highlight of the trip. Many of my friends were train enthusiasts and a number had a layout at home. My activities in that area were limited by funds and only included clockwork Hornby products on a small scale. A friend from a more affluent family had an extensive electric OO layout set up in a room and the rolling stock and locos were exquisite and frequently visited.

  • In 1965 I escaped to the bush after completing teacher training at UNSW - as an Industrial Arts teacher. Skills learned there were great training for a railway modeller!

I now live on the far South Coast but model the Central West of NSW around 1960 (plus or minus a bit). The main reason for this is my somewhat itinerant life style as a teacher and the extended time I spent in that area. I was lucky enough to live in many areas that would provide inspiration for railway modellers. My first serious layout was built around the walls of a bedroom at Kanahooka in 1975; the next at North Beach (Urunga).

I have lived in Blayney, Orange, Grenfell, Parkes, Forbes, Urunga, Repton (near Raleigh), North Beach (Mylestom), Kanahooka, Springwood, Lapstone, Blaxland, Faulconbridge, Oberon (Hazelgrove), Bensville (Central Coast) and now, on the far south coast in the Bega Valley.

The house (a Nissen Hut) we had when first married was on the Brolgan Road and near Goobang Signal Box, only a few hundred metres away. The main line and branch line there was a source of spilled coal from the tenders of shunting locos, and it was used to heat our little house. The house and farm is now buried under part of the National Logistics Hub at Parkes.

My father in law, Jack Evans at work in Goobang Junction Signal Box.