Track Placement Completion

All the yard trackage has now been tacked in place with track pins. The 'bake & cooking paper' was ripped away, except for the pieces showing the location of the station and the goods shed. The next stage will be the making of the butt-joins at the two interfaces of the sections. The ends of the outer modules are still to have the end-plates fitted.

Turntable and Initial Track Placements

The 57ft turntable (originally a 73ft Peco turntable before being 'reduced in diameter') was test fitted into the baseboard.

Following the test fitting of the turntable, the central section track plan was drawn on two strips of 'bake & cooking paper' taped together and then taped to the top of the baseboard. It would be ripped away once all track is down.
The initial trackage was laid in the loco facilities area and one end of the station. As each electrofrog turnout was positioned, a hole was drilled for a turnout control rod (if or when used).  Initially, turnouts will be operated directly by hand. The stock rails and frog rails opposite the turnout blades end will have insulated joiners fitted. An electrically conductive grease may be used to improve conductivity between the turnout blades and stock rails.

A sample goods shed was used for a test placement. The actual Strahalbyn goods shed has the platform at the opposite end of the building.  More on the goods shed and other structures later.

Framework and Baseboard

Select Framework in the Menu at the top for details.

Introduction and Plan

Strathalbyn railway station is a former station on the South Australian Railways broad gauge line from Adelaide to Victor Harbor. The station is still currently in use, both as a railway station and as a Visitor Information Centre. SteamRanger Heritage Railway currently operates tourist trains through Strathalbyn; the SteamRanger website has a short history of Strathalbyn station.

Fortunately, as the station and yards can fit into a 4m x 0.7m area in N scale using virtually no compression, a portable layout was considered to be reasonably easy to make using a standard modular system as the basis for the modules. As not all of the module sections would be rectangular in shape and as DCC (Digital Command Control) would be used to control the trains, the Aus-moN free form modular system, still under development, was chosen as the basis for construction. The layout would consist of three sectional modules. A central module of approximately 1800mm x 600mm and two end modules of approximately 900mm long each with one end incoporating a 20 degree curve diminishing the width to 400mm. Layout height to top of rail would be a nominal 1200mm. Peco Code 55 track and turnouts were chosen to be used as the Peco track represents the prototype track more closely. The free download version of XTrackCAD was used to design the layout plan.

Modules representing the river bridges and the flour mill and adjacent wheat silo (with siding) may be considered at a later stage, as may also Sandergrove junction station.

I wish to acknowledge fellow modellers who are involved with this project; Greg, Mark, Stuart, Rodney and Peter.

(Strathalbyn Station - Mid 1960s)

XTrackCAD diagram of the modular layout plan: