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: