Daily Archives: 01/02/2015

Site seeing, Sites of interest, Tramways, Web

Site Seeing – February 01

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I live very close to Melbourne in Victoria – home of the worlds largest urban tramway network in the world. The entire network covers 250 kilometres of track; has 493 trams, 25 routes, and 1,763 tram stops. Melbourne’s tram network is larger than the largest networks in Europe (admittedly not by much) such as those in St. Petersburg (240 km), Berlin (190 km), Moscow (181 km) and Vienna (172 km). What does all of this have to do with today’s site seeing post? Funny you should ask that question.

Site 1: Victoria Park

The first site I wanted to mention is Victoria Street (Link here). This great tramway layout has visited several of the model shows in my region and is a well thought out and small layout. Somewhere in my large collection of digital photos I have some of the layout. When I can find them I’ll post them up.

Site 2: Proto: 87 stores

If you’ve decided to model a tramway, you can use the track and switch components found on this page (Link Here) to make all that lovely street trackage. Now this is not just for tramways, any street railway can be modelled using these components. Very nice stuff.

Overcast and cool in Ballarat today. Hope you are having a great day where you are.

Layouts

Now that’s settled: Victoria Park revisited

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I’ve not seen this layout before, but being a fan of passenger rail, and really wanting to model a smaller (read portable) layout, I really rather like the look of Victoria Park. Take a look at this one I think that you will enjoy it.

Chris Mears's avatarPrince Street

I think I’ve settled on a plan and it’s time to start talking about it. As I mentioned in the title, I’m going to build a second version of Ian Futer’s Victoria Park plan. This was the same plan I used for the first of the micro layouts I built last winter. Here’s a quick view of the plan:
Victoria Park actual
I’ve shared it before, but here’s a superb Youtube video of the layout in operation:

And, finally, a photo of what I built the first time:
DSC00209
While it doesn’t show in my photo, the top of that baseboard wasn’t exactly level. This was more from my inadvertantly leaning on it than any structural issue with the foam core-based structure. Worse, the length of track designed to exit the board and connect to the staging sidings was some of the worst I think I’ve ever built and it was really almost too…

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