Amidale Layout Tour

On the afternoon of the Saturday at the Convention, we jumped in Peter’s trusty car and made our way to the three layouts of locals from the New England Club that were made available to display to Convention attendees on for the afternoon. The layouts were called Great Northern Railway, Warm Corner, and Garibaldi Central.

Our first visit was to Great Northern Railway. This is located in a room maybe 8m x 6.5m. It is based on a main station of Armidale and a consists of a number of local crossing loops. There is also a staging area along one wall where a good number of trains are hidden as well as having hidden trackage that runs behind the main Armidale station to access one of the peninsulas. The layout is still only at the track laid stage apart from a few places where the scenery has started.

The Armidale Good Shed

Photo of Armidale

The Model Creation of the photo above

The scenery and the bridge we photographed the day before

The second was layout was Warm Corner. On this layout it appeared that all locos had sound installed. Trains ran very well. This layout was DCC and powered by the radio variant of the NCE system. The first room had a very nice city scene, and the layout disappeared into the next room. As you walked into the next room, the floor went up a few steps and the head height stayed constant. You had to be a little person in order to stand upright. Large amounts of foam were placed around each beam so you did not hit your head. A lot of very nice scenery and completed buildings were on display. The layout was double track and there were a number of passing loops to store a few trains. It is basically 100% finished. One thing that did tickle my fancy was spotting a model of my Toilet Block from many years ago that was published in the AMRM magazine.

The main layout room

The Toilet Block

Low headroom area with control panels hidden away

Lots of yard space

The third house we went to actually had two layouts. There was a circle of track outside in large scale around a few trees and the vegetable garden. Here a Budd car was trundling around.

Budd Car rounds the bend

Under the house was a very nice layout called Garibaldi Central that was double track. This layout had some absolutely brilliant scenery and scratch built buildings. It was powered by the CDA DC controllers. Some of the scenes on this layout were absolutely brilliant. This layout was also sporting a model of my Toilet Block – at least some people must get some benefit out of these small articles in the AMRM magazine.

A Nice Oil Depot

Suburbia with the goods shed in the background

Absolutely Brilliant Houses.  The one on the right is the owners current house.