Wellingong

Wellingong is a fictional junction station of two single main line routes, somewhere in NSW, in what I call the ‘grungy’ era of the late 1970s/early 1980s. The layout itself features Wellingong Junction at the western end of Wellingong station, a single line that circumnavigates the layout twice, and two off-layout semi-hidden sidings. The project was started in early 2013 and finished earlier this year, minus the odd bit of micro detailing and the ongoing addition of new rolling stock and locomotives.

Background

It has always been on my bucket list to build a model railway layout in retirement and, though retirement is still a few years away, I thought that I would make a start well before then. I had run out of projects and a move to the central Queensland coast took me away from one of my main pursuits, so there was spare finance and time available to direct towards a layout.

As a teenager and into my early 20s, I had built two layouts; one HO/OO with a British and European flavour and an N scale layout based in western England. When planning my current layout I dismissed British prototype, as OO is not an accurate scale, and European HO also, as most prototypical European railways are electrified and I wanted to avoid overhead catenary. American outline was also ruled out, as the trains are too long to model accurately within the space that I have available. Plus, the western USA is one of my favourite locations, but I didn’t have the space to model the grandeur of the landscape to my satisfaction. I wanted to avoid N as I find it’s too small for my liking so the choice had to be HO.

Over the years I had lost touch with the modern developments in model railways in terms of technology, the quality and variety of modern r-t-r locomotives and rolling stock, plus the proliferation of manufacturers. I had never considered Australian outline, or even knew of its existence, until a visit to one of the larger model train shows. So now the seed was sown, but as the railways of Australia are very diverse the next challenge was what system and what era to model.

After a lot of research and internet searching, I settled on the NSW railways (PTC/SRA) in the late 1970s/early 1980s period, as this represented an era when there was a great variety in both rolling stock and locomotives and was late enough to avoid the steam era, which I have no desire to model. This era also encompassed what I