Monday, March 14, 2011

Main Western Line Video

A few weeks ago Chris and I visited John Brown, who is the builder extraordinaire of the Main Western Line layout that models the NSWGR Main Western from Tarana to Bathurst with the branch to Oberon.
I was invited up to take some pictures and video of this huge layout. I keep forgeting the exact dimensions but it is I think 70' x 33' in a room that is something like 80' x 45'. Apologies for the lack of metric dimensions but the old measure just seems to give a better idea of the size.
The layout is a U shape with two teardrops at each end of the U and the staging yard at the base.
I only managed to video two trains, one each way in the 4 hours that we were there.

Here is a short video of a western line goods passing through Locksley and then through the well known three arch road bridge.
Unfortunately, John was asked to build short backscenes so that the owner's wife could see out the large picture window at one end of the railway room (a hall really) and this makes shooting a video less than ideal. Still pictures can of course be edited to make the walls, windows, etc. disappear and while it is possible if the video camera doesn't move it is no where near as easy.
Chris and I drove via the road from Tarana that follows the railway which was very interesting, at one stage as we were leaving Tarana we crossed a bumpy bit of road with two cracks across the roadway and realised it was all that was left of the beginning of the Oberon branch, very sad.
The road is very narrow and I was glad that we didn't meet any cars coming the other way as I was too busy with one eye on the railway line.
At one stage we passed a large brick retaining wall that seemed strangely out of place at the time as the railway was out of site well above us.
We hope to visit again and with a bit of planning to get a better video view of the layout.

2 comments:

Andrew Campbell said...

Hi Ray,

I caught up with John last November and I took a heap of pics but unfortunately not many were usable because I stuffed up the lighting. You did a great job with the video.

Andrew

Ray P said...

Andrew

I found the first time that I went to an Open Day there that I had the same problem.

Answer - turn off those great big room lights (sodium iodine?).

I once went all the way to an exhibition in Canberra to photograph Bolivia and came back with the same issue - same lights. Of course I only found out when I got home.

Extremely hard to fix and not worth the effort involved.

Ray