GOULBURN

One weekend we were travelling to display our previous exhibition layout Wallerawang at an exhibition in Canberra. A stopover at Goulburn gave us some time to have a good look around the station and yard areas. It was also about this time that our Group had been tossing around ideas for a suitable location to model for our next exhibition layout, and so the seeds were sown.

We had a few ‘must haves’ for what would become our group's 5th exhibition layout, and Goulburn seemed to tick a lot of the boxes:

• a double track main line for continuous Up and Down train operation (and easy running at exhibitions)
 • somewhere not ‘under the wires’
• extra loops or sidings for additional stabling and shunting interest

Goulburn had all this and more. In fact, it offered us a different sort of challenge - how to fit in everything in the limited space that we had. It was obvious we would not be able to replicate all the yards, station and roundhouse areas in model form.

Goulburn is located on the Main Southern railway line and is 224km from Sydney by rail. It was and still is to a large extent an important stop on the route between Sydney and Melbourne. Trains for Canberra and the line that formerly ran to Cooma leave the main Southern line just south of Goulburn, and the former branch to Crookwell also connected at Goulburn.

Research involved getting copies of the track arrangements and building and structure plans from the NSW Railways archives, and several site visits where we took lots of photographs. Track plans were drawn up, modified, and re-drawn, looking at how we could produce a suitable scale model of Goulburn in the limited space.

In the end we decided to focus on the main station and adjacent goods shed and yard area, known as North yard. After all, it was the magnificent station building that had attracted us