Volume 5, Issue 11 October 2014

The Flimsy The Newsletter of Division 2 of the NMRA AR

OUR OCTOBER MEETING We had a roll-up of 17 today at Dion Koch’s place

where our Illustrious Leader welcomed two new faces to today’s meeting – John Martin and Peter Dinham. But hey, hang on a mo. Isn’t Peter vaguely familiar? In fact, isn’t he already a member? Yes, that’s quite right – it’s just that we haven’t seen him for so long.

Memories came flooding back. Wasn’t it Peter who concocted that magnificently complicated excuse for missing our previous meeting? Let’s test him to see if he can tell the same story twice. But Peter has been learning well from the many recent high powered Inquiries and Royal Commissions on TV news and was one jump ahead of us. All we could get from him was a cautiously defensive “I can’t recall”.

Announcements Big day today! We desperately need the Royal

Tuggeranong Town Band and the Banks Borough Marching Girls, but unfortunately such a grand entourage is way too big to squeeze into this tight cul-de-sac with the Koch residence at the far end, so we will just have to make do without them.

Our Fearless Leader called the meeting to order and announced the latest NMRA Achievement Program Awards…

Jess Brisbane – Master Builder, Structures Rob Nesbitt – Model Railroad Engineer, Electrical Presentations of their framed certificates then

followed, generating much applause while our Illustrious Leader and the proud certificate holders pandered to the paparazzi by posing for the obligatory photographs.

Our Intrepid Leader announced that the format of MainLine is under consideration now that it is to be published solely on the Internet. Until now MainLine has always been produced in portrait format on A4 paper, but with computer screens mostly designed these days for landscape format, should the MainLine format be changed to landscape? The meeting favoured landscape for MainLine, so this sentiment is

now to be passed up the line to the NMRA Australian Regional Committee.

Our Benevolent Leader then raised the question of doing likewise for The Flimsy. Landscape format too? Yes, definitely.

“It shall be done!” quoth our All-Powerful leader, and yea, verily, it was done.

And MainLine? Ah, bigger things take longer. John Gillies informed us about our Division 2

Christmas Dinner which is on Friday 12 December at 1830 hrs, 6.30 pm or 5 bells in the dog watch,

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according to tribe. It will be at the Olive At Mawson restaurant at the northern end of Southlands shopping centre. Menu details are to be decided by and advised by email.

Show & Tell Jess Brisbane displayed her burnt out house which

is to be placed at the rear of her Innsmouth On30 scale layout. Faithfully following prototype practice in modelling a structure of this type, Jess first constructed the building. She then set fire to it and extinguished the fire at the right moment to get the best finished effect. WARNING! Do not copy this technique at larger scales, especially 1:1.

To clarify any confusion in regard to the name of

Jess’s layout, it should be made clear that Jess is modelling the Arkham & Vermont Railroad which runs to the port village of Innsmouth. The setting is in Maine, USA.

Jess also displayed the same brickwork she showed us at our last meeting. It was then a clean styrene sheet of brickwork, straight out of the packet. Transformed entirely, it is now a rather dirty outhouse, perfect for the layout.

Rob Nesbitt showed us his recently acquired HO scale Swiss E4/4 class (0-8-0T) steam locomotive – Swiss Federal Railways No 8901. Made by Fulgurex, a top class Swiss manufacturer, this fine model tank loco is of a prototype rebuilt in 1930 from a mainline

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2-8-0 tender locomotive originally built in 1907. The rebuild explains the powerful appearance of this tank loco.

John Payne displayed his Southern Pacific Daylight rake of articulated cars made by Soho in the 1970s. Declaring these cars to be “almost prototypically correct”, John hauled out his mighty Bible to authenticate his claim. This SP Bible is ‘Southern Pacific Daylight Train 98-99’ written by Richard K Wright and published by Wright Enterprises, 1970. With 656 pages and gross tonnage of 5 Kg, this is only Volume I in a series. You have to be keen to own the lot.

John Gillies and John Martin together displayed a pair of HO scale General American Dry-Flo covered hopper wagons of around 1965 vintage. One bore Northern Pacific livery (John Gillies’s) and the other

Union Pacific (John Martin’s). Both were very nicely detailed models by Tangent Scale Models. For photos which can be enlarged considerably, illustrating this detail, see http://tinyurl.com/ok3todl

Graeme Hodges the First showed us his O scale back-blocks building with its detailed interior and a suitable delivery van parked out the front, making an attractive rural diorama. This very impressive and nicely weathered building is actually made of paper, though it neither looks like or feels like it. The van bore the lettering PMG and of course we all know what that

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stands for, don’t we. But Graeme patiently explained to us ignorant lot that these were actually the initials of the original tavern proprietor Pedro Maria Gomez who had now gone to gaol and that the business had since been taken over by his brother Pepe. This subsequently brought about a change of the initials on the truck to match the name on the building. Gee, thanks Graeme, we’d be in a real mess if we didn’t know that.

Mal Risby passed around two recently purchased British railway books. One was on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway and the other was on the Bodmin & Wenford Railway, both of them published by Halsgrove. One wonders how books on such highly specialised subjects can sell, however this becomes much clearer on realising that Britain has the world’s highest number of railway enthusiasts per head of population. You write it – there’s someone in UK keen to read it.

But Halsgrove isn’t just a railway publisher. See http://www.halsgrove.com/ for an idea of the extent of Halsgrove’s coverage of esoteric topics. Keep watching as the images change.

Peter Dinham spoke of his recent experiences on the Ghan from Darwin to Adelaide from 10.00 on Day 1 to 10.45 on Day 3. Altogether it took 50 hours travelling time at an average speed of 80 kph on track rated at 110 kph. The train was hauled by two NR Class locos.

(Continued from page 2) Peter spoke enthusiastically of this experience which he warmly recommended to all.

The Main Show Dion Koch presented his own railway interests in

informative and entertaining fashion. Dion and his brother Dallas inherited their interest by growing up in a family with a heritage in railways.

Dion’s big interest is in collecting. He brought to life for us the excitement of the chase – the thrill of hunting down those hard-to-gets on the Internet. Building a layout is next on his list of priorities, and operating comes much lower down. Dion is essentially a collector and a builder.

Dion is currently about to build a new layout and the room for this has already been allocated. His main interest is in N scale Union Pacific with, inevitably some BN and SP rolling stock as well.

At the mention of N scale, Peter Dinham automatically switched into recruiting mode. Turns out he just happened to have with him some membership application forms for the ACTMRS. Just sign here, Dion—anyone else interested?

Dion’s talk led into an animated and interesting discussion. Highly multiskilled, Dion prepared afternoon tea at the same time which we then all enjoyed.

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Book Review by John Gillies Northern Pacific – A Personal Perspective

By Matthew J. Herson Morning Sun Books

eBook, 256 pages Morning Sun Books http://morningsunbooks.com/ has published over 500 titles since the company was established in 1986 and many of us have some of their traditional hard cover Trackside and Color Guide books to aid our modelling or historical interest in pro-totype railroads. These books have 128 pages and around 300+ colour photos. The company recently introduced a new line of eBooks which are designed for use on Apple iPad/Mac (purchased from the Apple iBook Store) and Windows PC/laptop/tablet (purchased from the Morning Sun website). The Adobe Digital Edition versions of these eBooks used on Windows computers are downloaded as EPUB files which are not fully supported on other tablets (such as Android) and/or e-reader software. Everything is explained on the Morning Sun Books eBook FAQ page http://morningsunbooks.com/pages/ebook-faq . At well under half the price of a printed Morning Sun Book, I bought the Windows version of the eBook for US$19.99 to try out the new format on my laptop. It was a 20 MB download and I’m very happy with it and consider it great value for money. Matt Herson has been a member of the Northern Pacific Railway Historical Association for many years and has written a number of informative articles on the NP’s equipment for the NPRHA’s The Mainstreeter quarterly magazine. He has also made some excellent contributions to discussions on the Yahoo groups NPModeler discussion list. The eBook has a cover page, title page, intro and meet the author page, a table of contents with links that take you to the 9 sections of the book and 256 well captioned colour photos with one per page. Navigating

to and between the 9 sections is easy, although the links take you to the first page of each section and you have to move sequentially through the photos/pages. You can also use the progressive control bar at the bottom of the page to drag more quickly through the photos to what you’re looking for. The text search feature only appears to work for the current page, rather than searching the entire document. Returning to the book in a later computer session opens the page you were last viewing. On my laptop screen, the normal display size pro-duces a 184 x 115 mm image (caption underneath) and full screen display produces a slightly larger 206 x 131 mm image. The 256 photos in the eBook are slightly less than the 285 photos in Morning Sun Books NP Color Guide book, but many of the Color Guide photos are smaller than the screen size images of the eBook. The images are very clear (except for the truck area of a very small number of freight car photos which I suspect may have something to do with the scanning of the original slides), well lit and show a wide range of NP subjects. Most of the photos were taken by the au-thor during visits to Montana and other parts of the NP beginning in 1965, 5 years before the NP was absorbed

Seen recently on the pages of Model Railroader—a saving at an online store that several of us have used

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www.nmra.org.au

Disclaimer: Any resemblance between characters in this newsletter and real model railroaders is purely intentional but no offence whatever is intended. Every reader has the right of reply and we look forward to pub-lishing them! Views represented in this newsletter are those of the contributors and do not necessarily have

National Model Railroaders Association Australasian Region

Division 2—ACT Bringing model railroading to you

From the Editor:

I recently received the following from our scribe:

“John Bullen apologises for the delay in writing the text for this issue of the Flimsy, pleading circumstances beyond his control. Although he had as usual written it before the meeting was held, he then couldn’t find it amidst the chaos of preparing to move house. But when he finally did find it, he found the next issue as well, which will now follow shortly.”

John as usual is being modest, verbose as ever, but still modest. He and Yvonne are in the middle of a major upheaval. What with moving house, dodgy health and a wrecked car, he has still managed to provide his usual standard of Flimsy material (very flimsy, some might say!) and keep his sense of humour more or less intact. Many thanks, John, and may your current situation resolve itself to your satisfaction. We wish you and Yvonne all the best.

Happy Modelling Viv div2sup@nmra.org.au

News • Next meeting will be at the home of Stephe

Jitts 22 Glebe St, Yass, NSW 2582 at 2:00 pm, where we will learn about the latest incarnation of the Kangaroo Valley Railway.

• Our farewell dinner will be held at the Olive at Mawson at 6:30 pm on Friday, 12 De-cember. If you’re coming, please make sure John Gillies is aware as he has to con-firm the booking

Back Page Photo

Class Re 421 6,230 HP (4,650 kW) Bo-Bo electric locomotive number 421 381-5 powers a freight through Rüdesheim, Germany, on the banks of the Rhine in September 2009. The loco is in the livery of SBB Cargo, a rail freight subsidiary of Swiss Federal Railways. The Re 4/4 class origi-nally totalled 397 locos, built during the period 1964 thru 1985, and was Swiss railways most nu-merous class ever.

Morning Sun Books is onto a winner with their new format.

Finally, as a postscript, I've got a couple of future modelling projects which will benefit from photos in the eBook. I emailed the author thanking him for his efforts and requested, if he was willing to share it, a copy of a scanned slide in the eBook to aid construc-tion of a future flat car model. He graciously provided it along with two additional scans of cars in the same order! Model railroading is fun and full of nice helpful people too.

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as part of the original BN merger. Later photos con-tinue through to the early 2000s, with some from his collection. Most of the eBook is devoted to the NP’s equipment, but smaller selections of BN, Amtrak in transition, MRL and shortline railroads using ex-NP rails are included. There is good coverage of the various models of NP’s diesel electric locomotives with either roster photos or photos with their trains – many of which show off Montana’s scenery or yard activities, both of which could be very useful for an NP modeller. The diesel electric photos make up about 60% of the eBook with the remaining NP coverage including rep-resentative samples of passenger cars, freight cars, cabooses and MoW equipment. There’s even one steam locomotive photo and a couple of farewell to the NP photos to complete the eBook. I noted a very small number of mainly date related typos, but with my previous knowledge of the NP and the BN, I could workout (to my satisfaction) the actual dates. I have a bit of an interest in freight cars and have sourced NP freight car photos from books, the Internet and NPRHA slide sets, which resulted in me previ-ously having 14 of the 36 freight car photos, but I con-sider the 22 new photos a very worthwhile addition to my collection. I would have personally preferred the eBook in PDF format to enable greater magnification of the photos and a better search facility, but appreciate the pub-lisher’s use of the EPUB file format for anti-copying reasons. All my other eBooks use PDF format and came on CDs which enabled me to copy them directly to my PC – all are now on my laptop for easy refer-ence. Northern Pacific – A Personal Perspective is an enjoyable and informative read which provides wide and useful coverage of a predecessor of the railroad I model. If the other eBooks are of similar quality,

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