Back to the Kotanga Tramway.

[Annie]

Hi Andrew Tinplate track unless it's absolutely pristine or is an out of the ordinary type made by one of the classic era manufacturers has little collector value and most tinplate train enthusiasts end up with more of the stuff than they know what to do with. Going by past experience if I was to gather up all the track I have and sell it I would be very lucky if I found somebody to pay me $NZ150 to take it off my hands and that sum of money would buy me four lengths of PECO G-45 track or just one turnout/point/switch which wouldn't be nearly enough to build the first stage of my layout. Thanks for the suggestion though

Sleepers won't be so difficult as I can get the local joinery workshop to cut some long sleeper strips from pine for me which I can then cut to length as needed. Pine will be just fine for sleepers for indoor use. As this section of the Kotanga tramway will be running through the town's streets speeds will be at walking pace so track joints won't be so critical. Not that I intend to be careless with tracklaying or anything like that of course.
In the early days parts of the street tramway here in town were laid with wooden rail which is something I want to try; - though plainly it won't be those sections of track where Emily will go chugging about
on!

Turnouts/switches/points are going to be of the stub type which should be very straight forward to build.

[Annie]

Cosmetically preserved Johnston 'A' Class standing on wooden track. This is a New Zealand built geared loco intended for use on bush tramways.

The big advantage in basing the Kotanga Tramway on the town where i live is that when I go out to do a little grocery shopping I can do some field research at the same time. This engineering workshop is on Wharf Street and I'm planning on building a model based on it for my layout. Please forgive the poor quality photo as it was evening and the light was failing.


The blue and white building next door is much more modern and doesn't interest me at all. On the other side of the engineering works will be a small bootmaker's shop and next to that on the corner of Wharf Street will be the barber shop and billiard hall establishment with all the tobacco advertisements. I'm cheating a little with jumbling buildings from different eras together, but hey, it's my model town and tramway so I'll put wot buildings I like in it.
In doing my research I was trying to figure out what had happened to certain buildings in town that had seemed to up and suddenly disappear. The answer was fire. All the buildings were wooden, no electricity meant open fireplaces, oil lamps and candles so buildings burning to the ground was really commonplace. Sometimes most of an entire block of buildings on a street would be lost to fire in a single night. The local historical society actually has a map and a list of the major fires that occurred in town. One of the biggest was when the old two storied Bank of New Zealand branch building in town burned down in 1952.

I've decided that my layout is going to be inhabited by wooden dolls house people. The ones I have already are easy to reduce in height by shortening their legs and they look just fine to me.

Emily's driver, - I didn't catch his name, but I imagine Bill will know.


I like an element of whimsey in my large scale modelling. For years I was a serious finescale modeller (no smiling allowed) until one day I realised it was going to take me 150 years to build a whole layout to the same serious finescale standards I was working in. After that I collected tinplate '0' gauge trains and had much more fun

Something I wondered about was whether some of the houses from the Sylvanian Families range of toys could be adapted to my purposes. They seem to be about the right size.

[tuppenced]

For years I was a serious finescale modeller (no smiling allowed) until one day I realised it was going to take me 150 years to build a whole layout to the same serious finescale standards I was working in.  After that I collected tinplate '0' gauge trains and had much more fun

Me too, Annie, but in Gauge 1. On which note,
- my first garden railway (60 years ago) was on G0 tinplate track.
- my first narrow gauge garden railway (50 years ago) was on the same track, but I found it frustratingly mobile under the greater weight of NG stock.
- I now have a small amount of vintage G1 Tinplate track, but as it's so battered after a century of abuse, I only use it for Display
- for running in public, British G1 Tinplate fans use NEW tinplate track - manufactured in Australia.
- ergo we don't need to worry that G0 tinplate fans might run out of track if Annie chops up hers.

Wooden rails are practical - especially if faced with metal as per many real bush trams - and I have an acquaintance in the US who even uses the metal capping for 2 rail electric and makes working turnouts. Will look for photos if I can.

[Annie]

The fact that most of the tinplate track I own has a nice 'patina' about it makes ideal for recycling into lightweight tramway track. As you say the serious tinplate layout builders all buy brand new replica track for their layouts and don't bother with the old stuff.

I've actually gone ahead and ordered some nice hardwood stripwood suitable for making wooden railed tramway track. When I first started to plan out the idea of building a bush tramway model some years ago now I wanted to have part of the tramway laid with wooden rails. There won't be much of it to be seen on the 'mainline' through the town, but once out into the countryside it will come into its own.

Yes I do remember someone telling me about metal capped wooden rails and it was something I meant to look into. If you could find any photos of how your US acquaintance did it I would be very grateful.

[steam Technology]

What an Excellent Thread. I am enjoying this enomously,

[tuppenced]

Annie,

I've started a new Topic in this forum about wooden rails, including model track:
http://gardenrails.myfreeforum.org/sutr ... php#114898

and if you use the email button below this message to sent me an email saying, "Hi I'm Annie from GRF." I'll email you back with a document pulling more information together.

David 1/2d

[Annie]

I just won a Sylvanian cottage on our local auction site and I think with a repaint, a little weathering and a corrugated iron roof it should do very nicely.

[Annie]

The hopefully soon to be wooden rail has arrived which I thought was really good going considering it's almost Christmas and the postal system is overloaded. I ordered 5/16th" x 5/16th" stripwood in 48 inch lengths which somebody still managed to break around 12 inches off the ends of each length despite the very good effort at packing made by the company I purchased them from. The damage won't matter though because I wasn't planning on laying continuous run wooden rails anyway.

[-steves-]

Very impressive work throughout Looks great.

[Peter Butler]

Annie, with postal, damage the way you describe it, you could easily be living in the UK.

[Annie]

I've got myself a few toys to play with now so all going well I'll be getting some things done over the next week or so.



I've got the Sylvanian cottage to work on and I'm very hopeful that it will become a nice wee cottage on Kotanga's mainstreet. No doubt once Bill and the crew find out about it I'm going to be harassed until it's finished so they can use it as their lunchroom while the tramway is under construction.

Some time ago I purchased quite a few of the HLW 4 wheel flatcar kits and now they are being dug out for use on the tramway. I previously fitted them with 7/8th scale coupler pockets, but I've decided that they can stay like that. If nothing else it will be easier to handle the coupling pins.
The blue van body fitted to a HLW underframe is a cut down New Bright boxcar body and it's in process of becoming a small tool van. The roof needs to be anointed with corrugated iron and redundant details removed. Once painted in grotty dark green and weathered I think it will look the part.
I like these HLW kits, the one in 'works grey' has had its plank ends notched and distressed which has given it a nicely 'used' appearance.

The '0' gauge gondola is a model I scratchbuilt ages ago from wood and I even made the archbar trucks. Wheels are coarse scale. I dug it out of its box with the thought that I might be able to re-gauge it to 45mm and use it on the tramway, but it really is too small unfortunately.

[tuppenced]

This is going well, Annie!

I like the gondola. Personally I keep a small stache of lightweight 32mm gauge stock that I can take with me if invited out to play on a 16mm line - or at an exhibition with a 32mm gauge circuit.

LGB or Bachmann archbar trucks are fine for 1/24 scale.

D1/2d

[Keith S]

The arch-bar trucks on that wagon look very nice. Actually the whole car looks great. You're obviously a talented modeller.

[steam Technology]

Very Nice Annie, what are you trams / locos powered by

[Annie]

Very Nice Annie, what are you trams / locos powered by

I prefer battery electric to power my locos, though I do have plans in hand to put together a clockwork 0-4-0 saddle tank just for fun.

Thanks for the nice comments guys it's very encouraging

[Annie]

So I now have a second Sylvanian cottage, but it most probably won't arrive until after the new year. Sir Clothem Cap has one of these on his Warren Point and Stow Railway doing duty as a station building which is where I got the idea to look out for one of my own.


Sooooo that gives me two houses. Is that enough for a town yet? - or maybe a very small village But the main thing is that Kotanga township is starting to happen which cheers me up a lot.

My thumbnail plan is that the two Sylvanian cottages will be on the opposite side of the layout board where the town begins and next to them will be various shops with the tramway running in front of them. The town and wharf boards will form an 'L' shape with the tramway branching off the main right of way towards the wharf. The main right of way will then hopefully then lose itself among some cunningly placed buildings and enter a hidden storage siding.

With the wharf area I know very well how much the river level varies around the old wharf site here in town and after rain the river level can get very high. So in order to reduce the amount of wharf I have to build I'm going to model the river at its 'wet season' level which will mean puddles will be seen on the main street through the town.

Back in the day there were a surprising number of hotels with licenced premises here in town so that means I'm going to have to build at least one which I'm not looking forward to. Fortunately it will be low relief which is a blessing.

[Annie]

I needed a small hotel building for Kotanga and I found this one which used to be at Wiri. There is still a hotel on the site these days, but it's a large brick and stucco building.
The advantage with this particular historic hotel is that its street frontage is small and most of it can be represented on the back scene. I don't have room for any of the large two storey hotels that used to be here in town with their huge verandahs and massive road frontage.

[MDLR]

That looks reasonably simple to reproduce - more coffee stirring sticks..........

[Annie]

My thoughts exactly Brian

I've made a New Years resolution to only build bush tramway locos that were built by New Zealand makers from now on. The Avonside and the 'Skylark' I was about to build have been put on the back burner and I may or may not come back to them later.

My present plan is to build a Johnston 'A' geared loco. These are nice useful locos and could be either a 0-4-0 or an 0-6-0 depending on whether the central drive axle was fitted with a pair of flangeless wheels or not. Lots of variations are shown in the surviving photos of these locos and I'm planning on putting together a unique combination of variations with my Kotanga tramway version. Makes sense really, most of these tramway locos were built to fit a particular set of circumstances so the Kotanga version will be built accordingly.

[tuppenced]

Here's an I/C conversion that's worth modelling too.





I've corresponded with one of the More & Sons family who had further information about it, but I think they are now too old to dig out the details.

A bit of detail Annie clearly knows:
These engines were build as 0-4-0s with the crank discs on the central jackshaft just OFF the rail-head. The idea was said to be that on very dodgy track the discs might save a derailment. But some users fitted full-diameter flangeless wheels in their place to make an 0-6-0 like this:



David 1/2d