'Final' Version of Cassilis

Firstly, my spray booth efforts have gone nowhere so far except to find out that air is not like water, you can't put it through a smaller pipe and get a greater pressure, just the opposite. It seems that you should have ducting of the same size as the fan (300mm) so I am trying to work out how to make larger ducting and to get it to the exit vent without destroying the storage I currently have.

Now, back to Cassilis.

I have built the baseboards (2 - see plan) and they are now in place above the lower staging yard. I have probably tried too hard to fit in too many goods options but the above plan is it. I have decided to keep the sidings straight to ease shunting with Kadees but did manage to angle the yard across the board area for a better effect. I have also managed to fit a loco siding for the branch loco and possibly for the CPH railmotor passenger service.

I am going to scratch build the points and try to put as much of my modelling into this station area as I can. Building a largish layout causes you to assess what you can achieve in a reasonable time and this leads you to realise that highly detailed work can't really be done all over. Some can do it but I decided years ago to build for overall effect with focussed highly detailed scenes (not too many of those as yet).

I have split the baseboards into two pieces as the lower staging yard is also able to be split into two. You never know if you may have to move in the future and I didn't want to put a lot into this station to have to scrap it later.

A couple of weeks ago Chris and I went for a cruise down to Crookwell and Boorowa to photograph some suitable infrastructure for Cassilis. I new there was a fair bit of infrastructure at Crookwell and I had found the silo at Boorowa when doing a Google Maps Streetview search.

I have previously seen a photo of Crookwell in snow and I can now believe it, no snow but Chris wouldn't get out of the car!

I needed the turntable pics as I recently bought Anton's 60' Sellers turntable which is very nice although it doesn't have the characteristic curve of the bottom of the frames. This is a bit annoying but given how nice the unit is otherwise I can live with it, particularly if there is a lot of static grass growing in the pit.

I am also planning to get one of Keiran Ryan's silo kits soon and needed detail photos of the silo, especially the corrugated iron unloading shed, the only part of the structure that Keiran doesn't supply.

On our way back we checked out Harden and I found a 5 ton yard crane on a square brick base. The interest here is that I have bought a Uneek 5 ton Crane kit and a Peter Boormans Workshop 5 Ton Crane kit. Both are the same version of crane and have cast and etched parts but the Uneek one has an octagonal concrete base and the Peter Boormans one does not come with a base. The point here is that it is going to be easier to build a square brick base than the octagonal version. It also adds a bit more interest.

As we were leaving Harden I turned around and was presented with this shot which I will use to close this post.


The old and the new - Harden South Box July 2009