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The Pine Hill Estate Railway
History
The railway at Pine Hill was built to 15-inch gauge, designed so that it could be useful to both the estate with its successful coal supply business and its neighbors.
Unfortunately it was nothing more than a garden railway built to an excessive size and never made enough money to cover operating costs. The record earnings being £39 in 1926. But the railway continued to run being funded out of the estates own pocket. In 1930 the railway purchased new second hand wagons and two new locomotives. To replace the aging rolling stock these proved to be a bad buy and the original locomotive continued as the main motive power until the railways closure.
In 1963 when Edward Smith (the owner of the railway) died the growth of motor transport made it almost inevitable that the line should close and the family decided to abandon the railway. At that time it had assets worth £2,452 and an accumulated loss of £32,000. In 1964 the railway was lifted and broken up.
The Model
The layout is freelance and represents a working narrow gauge railway on a small country estate. It is based on the idea put forward by Sir Arthur Haywood in his book Minimum gauge railways: their application, construction and working. I've set the railway sometime in the 1950's and have tried to make all the equipment is suitably weathered and rusted up to look run down after the lack of maintenance over the years.
The entire track is mix Peco OO gauge and the curves are about 5" radius although I would go slightly larger if I built it again. The track was spiked and glued down and ballasted with sieved clay I swept up outside. The whole layout was covered evenly with a layer of static grass while making sure that I didn't foul the flange ways.
I used common methods for building the layout. Weathering was achieved with a mix of India ink, dry brushing and chalks. I mounted two small speakers under the layout to provide some sound effects and wired these up to a mini jack. The sound effects come from a CD I mixed on the computer with sounds I downloaded from the Internet.
The trees were made with steel wire that I striped from some armored mains cable and twisted to form the armature. I then coated the armature by mixing paper/ salt/ flour/ water in a blender until it's was thick pulp. Then I mixed in some grout (I've been told since then that drywall compound works better) and some PVA glue by hand until
I had a putty mixture, at which point I spread it evenly all over my wire armature. Once the bark mix had set I speed up the process in the oven I painted it appropriate colours. And glued Woodland Scenics foliage to the branches with more PVA. When the glue was all dry I teased out the foliage so that there were less gaps in between the branches.
I currently have three locomotives. I scratch built two on HO mechanisms and the other one is a kit and runs on a spud motor bogie. The rolling stock is all built from kits at the moment and consists of flat and dropside wagons.
More photos here
What is Gn15?
Gn15 is G scale on HO track representing 15" gauge. Despite having the large scale which is great for detailing. You can fit a working layout in less space than most people would consider putting N gauge.
The smallest I've seen is 6" square! What this effectively means is that you get the dual benefits of working in a big scale with plenty of detailing possible but in a very small space, which means you can bring garden railroading indoors.
There are a few kits on the market now so rolling stock isn't a problem if you don't want to build your own. There must be thousands of suitable HO/OO mechanisms available if you want to scratch build your own locomotives.
Want to find out more? Visit these sites:
Gn15.info All sorts of information about Gn15
carendt.com Carl Arendt's excellent micro layout web site (Possibly the best train site on the internet)
Pepper7 Supplier of kits for Gn15
Pine Hill on tour
Christchurch 4-5 October 2003
A great weekend was had down at the Christchurch train show. I turned up on the Friday night to set up the layout and they had a giant space for me as there was some confusion about the size (the exhibition committee didn't think that a G scale layout could be that small). I alternated trains all day on the Saturday using some borrowed rolling stock and had lots of questions about my trees. The public seemed to miss the layout as it ended up tucked back a bit behind two large layouts.
On Saturday night was the prize giving and the committee choice award went to Pine Hill Estate. The prize being a G scale box car.
On Sunday more of the exhibitors came and had a look at this small layout and I think some of them went away thinking 'I can do that'.
Wellington 12 October 2003
I had my O gauge layout at this show on both days and took Pine Hill Estate along on the second day.
August 2004
Front cover of the New Zealand Model Railway Journal. Also a four page feature article inside the journal.
Christchurch 2-3 October 2004
Pine Hill Estate will be at The Big Model Train Show 2004 at the Pioneer Leisure Centre.
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