Site seeing – August 9th

Just the one site to see today, on YouTube, and the background idea for a future layout design. Let’s away!

Site 1: Bacchus Marsh, Victoria

Whenever I travel to Melbourne on the train I pass through Bacchus Marsh (it’s around the halfway point between Ballarat and Melbourne). I recently found a new channel on YouTube featuring Trams and Trains from around Melbourne. Watching the operations in the video below at Bacchus Marsh led me to thinking about an exhibition layout. With the wealth of Ready to run (RTR) rolling stock available and the intensive working of the passenger service (especially the storage of train sets) this could have the makings of a great medium-sized exhibition layout.

First watch the video and then take a look at the signalling diagram below.

Video 1: V/Line Variety at Bacchus Marsh Railway Station in 2012

Image 1: The Bacchus Marsh signalling diagram & Tram layout

I think that there is plenty enough in the track layout to keep an exhibition crew going all weekend. With the station being both a single platform terminus and through platform (with the right hand side going through to Ballarat and beyond) this could be nirvana for DMU & Loco hauled railway modellers. Your thoughts?

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Rapido trains in releasing a brand new model of the RDC

Introduction

I think that the RDC is a great addition to any layout. For those who model passenger operations anywhere from the late 1950s on, these little beauties fit right in. I believe that even in the USA they’re mostly gone now from day-to-day service.

Rapido’s new RDC-1

Thankfully they’re going to be remade by Rapido. And the work they put into this is amazing. Apparently they’ve scanned the real thing, and then worked off the scans and the blueprints to decide what was as-built, and what was in-service.

These cars also ran as is here in Australia. The Commonwealth Railways bought three of them for service in South Australia. I believe that ComEng (Commonwealth Engineering – Granville NSW) also built a set or two under license for use on the South Coast Daylight trains running from Sydney to Bombaderry (Nowra) and return daily but they never worked right for the NSWGR.

Eventually they had the motors pulled and became loco hauled (which is how I remember them in my youth on runs down the coast).

In chugging around their site I noticed that Rapido will produce units that are painted but unlettered. Hopefully this gets some of the Australian modellers interested.

They’re not cheap at CN$325 (especially with our rapidly sinking currency), however, I just checked and the Canadian Dollar is worth slightly less than ours at the moment (0.97 as of writing) so with shipping I’d expect landed costs to be under AU$375 mark..

Resources

The product information page: http://www.rapidotrains.com/rdc1.html

The versions page showing all the versions being produced: http://www.rapidotrains.com/rdcus.html