Weathered by Philden Showcase #29

My original Philden NSW A4 railway station building is available for sale.

After sitting safely stored inside a cardboard box at the top of my wardrobe for the past 5 years, my original HO scale Walker Models A4 NSW Railway Station building this week joined my growing list of sundry items being moved on over on my Philden Model Railway eBay page.

Having wrestled through the frustration of not being able to expand my model railway hobby beyond the confines of a small apartment layout, I’ve now made peace with the idea that Philden Beach is likely to be the biggest model railway I shall ever own. As such, all of the carefully stored models, unfinished kits, track, rollingstock and locomotives in various scales and gauges that I had held onto for these past few years, have one-by-one been taken out of the wardrobe, photographed, listed and then packed for the post enroute to their new owners. Including the original Philden Station that I had been saving just in case one day I could expand or even start a new Australian model railway layout.

It was a nicely finished model building, and one that I shall always remember for being on the cover of the Australian Model Railway Magazine back in August 2018. But I’d rather see the station live on on somebody else’s layout than accumulate as clutter tucked away in the wardrobe for another 5 years!

The station building was my first point of call when I made the switch to Australian modelling.

The decorated waiting room complete with station maps and posters.

My latter Beach Extension modern Countrylink Station also followed close behind. Being the catalyst for my switch to modelling the NSW North Coast line, there was simply no room to be able to reconfigure a passenger station into my HO scale shelf layout’s current configuration. The only modern passenger train from the era I am modelling is the NSW XPT, and a full seven car train in 1:87 scale is just as long as the visible portion of my shelf layout. So, after learning to be content with my layout in its current configuration, eventually I reached the point where I would just rather move it in, recoup some hard to come by cash, and put it towards something that can finish my layout off nicely.

My kit bashed Beach Extension modern NSW Countrylink Station followed right behind.

Though largely finished with brick paper, the building had a fully detailed interior.

And in a sign that I need to learn from my own lessons, I recently attended a model train club buy-and-sell for the first time in almost a year and picked up a collection of US piggyback trailers on flatcars, only to get home and ask myself what did I do that for? Sometimes it’s hard to walk past a bargain when thinking that it would make a nice small layout concept at some time in the future, when really, I should have just stuck to my list of things to keep an eye out for in OO9 narrow gauge and simply kept my hands in pockets when walking past everything else.

Some unbranded HO scale WABASH trailer on flatcars I picked up 2nd hand and weathered.

So instead, I gave them some slight repairs and a light weathering before listing them all for sale. Hobby dollars have become extremely hard to come by in 2024, and my HO purge will ensure that I raise enough funds to afford a final Australian DCC sound equipped locomotive to join Philden Beach’s small roster. I’m taking my time to consider all of the upcoming models that have been announced or have been recently released and will probably be very fussy when it comes to making my final decision.

One thing that does mean is that I will be doing no more Australian HO or N scale weathering given that my N scale plans were long dashed, and my HO journey is coming to an end. My weathering that I have featured here over the past couple of years, was largely the result of needing to amass a series of photographs for my Model Railway Weathered Wonders book to provide examples of the great variety of methods possible when it comes to weathering railway models. If I was after just one model of a particular wagon, I would always buy a full pack and weather them all as a batch before keeping one for myself and selling the others through eBay. Those days now appear over, and there are only a few Australian models remaining.

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…and there may not be too many more of these certificates for me to sign as a thank you for all your support. But it has been a necessary yet pleasant part of funding my book series these past two years.