A new layout - Lower South West: Part 1

 Hi everyone,

As many of you know I have been living on the East Coast for many years, however I have harbored the desire to build a Western Australian layout one day. Many plans have been draw up, many ideas thrown around. The layout went from a recreation of the Wagin - Lake Grace - Newdegate branch to something much more manageable - the Lower South West. 

Any layout I build has to have a junction. Junctions add so much to a layout, both in design and operation. It give you the opportunity to have a main line and branch line, have different classes of locomotive for heavy and light lines, shunting, a loco depot, etc etc. WA had many junctions, from major (Midland, Northam, Narrogin) to minor (Amery, Goomalling, Yillimining). After much though I picked Wonnerup in the states South West. This gave me the opportunity to model Busselton (an interesting place) and the timber branch to Nannup. After many attempts the final plan came together as below. 

This layout fits nicely into my 6m x 6m garage (the cars now live outside) with enough room for a table tennis table. Wonnerup is basically as it was in the early 80s, without the compound / double slip point. I only had room for the Busselton town yard unfortunately, and one track had to go, however the general feel of the place stays the same. With Nannup the yard is right, but the line to the timber mill runs off to the side of the yard rather than the end, again due to space. 

I've decided to set the layout in the mid 1980's - with a little modellers license. The mainline has been upgraded to take 16t locos in the assumption of more mineral sands traffic and the Australind beginning to run through to Busselton. So the main will be metal ballast, but the branch will remain 11t axle load, gravel ballast. This gives me great scope to run my DA and AB locos on the main, and the X and Y class locos on the branch. So lots of loco swaps, shunting and mixed running - everything I like in a layout.

I plan to update this blog as I go, although construction is a bit stop start depending on work, uni studies and volunteer commitments. However I will post next month on the disastrous start to the construction and the new methods I used to build the baseboards. I hope to also cover the building of the points - all have been handmade using the FastTracks jigs (which are fantastic and cannot be rated highly enough). 

Cheers, Cris