I guess the story behind Narellan could be best summarised from two previous attempts of building a model railway layout that ended in failure, the challenges of getting approval from my wife to build a layout, followed by a compromise that was put forward by my wife. All of this resulted in a successfully completed layout that got me thinking “do I really need a large layout?”
Back in 2007, just after getting married, I had the desire to build a layout. I originally decided to do something in North American N scale, as there was a broader range of ready to run N scale stock compared to Australian N scale. At the time I was living in a small rental house. A layout would need to reside in the small sunroom which, at the time, I thought to be not enough area to build anything in HO scale. I started planning the layout, purchased the track, locomotives and rolling stock, but I struggled to build the baseboard, scenery and buildings. At that point, the project hit the wall and did not progress from there.
Later on, we bought a town house, which had a good size garage in which I could build a larger layout. This was during the Global Financial Crisis and the Australian Economy was strong with the Australian dollar stronger against the British Pound and the US dollar. The British N scale products from Graham Farish and Dapol were top-notch models which could be acquired for very affordable price. This time around I progressed a little further with construction of the layout, to the point that I could almost run trains around. However, I over-engineered it and my track work did not provide good running of locomotives and rolling stock. Therefore, this project also ended up being abandoned.
I started to collect HO scale New South Wales Government Railways (NSWGR) locomotives with an ambition to one day have another go at building a functional layout. I started to follow various blog sites to see how other railway modellers did their layouts. This gave me the inspiration to one day try getting to their level of modelling.
Then the main turning point happened when, after a long and stressful week at work, my wife and I
