Little Chipping
In August 1827, as he was sailing along the Victorian coast, Lt Charles Twigg chanced upon a small bay. He named this Leafy Bay after his good friend, George Leaf, recently elected to the House of Commons as the member for Little Chipping.
The VR branch line eventually built to Leafy Bay ran through several small towns whose names were associated with this event. These included Little Chipping, Twigg, Fern and Leafy Bay. Fern was, of course, the family home for the Leafs. Every epic journey brings a good story, even in model railways.
An article on our model of Twigg appeared in AMRM Issue 182 (October 1993) and we followed it up with an article on Leafy Bay in Issue 214 (February 1999). Both layouts are minimum space shunting layouts, requiring two operators to exhibit. Since these articles were published, Twigg has had almost every building replaced and the trees have been replaced twice. It is currently undergoing another refurbishment. Leafy Bay has had one new set of trees. Both have had the scenery refreshed several times. With Leafy Bay we used live frog points and under track magnets for uncoupling. These were subsequently installed on Twigg.
Both are still exhibited, though not as often as they used to be. Our younger daughter has grown out of trains and the older one has her career and started a family as well, leaving little time available. She still comes to exhibitions and operates the layouts. Fortunately my wife, Carol, will also give a hand from time to time.
After completing Leafy Bay the intention had been to build Fern, the town between Leafy Bay and Twigg, with the potential to join the three layouts together. We even started the buildings while developing a track plan. However, a small problem got in the way. While on leave in 2003, I received an email from my employer to the effect… don’t come back.
We took this as an opportunity to go into business with two people whom I knew in the financial services industry. Anyone who has owned their own business will tell you, to be successful you are going to have to devote a lot of time and effort. For a time the railways didn’t get as much attention as they had previously.
I retired in 2016 so, all being well, there will be more modelling time. Fern will, hopefully, be built one day. In recent times more modelling has been done and the buildings constructed for the new layout, Little Chipping. A track plan was found in the July 2010 issue of Railway Modeller. Different scale and prototype, but minimum space. A little bit of modification and we had our track plan.
We like to shunt trains and with the other two layouts we use a 100 train sequence timetable that can be transferred from one layout to the next. This could take six days or more when exhibiting to finish. At each exhibition we pick up from where we finished at the previous exhibition irrespective of which
