Mum, Dad And Sons Work As Team On Railroad Project

November 15, 2010

A reader from Australia (Robert P) has kindly sent in these photos and story of the Pendle Town Rising layout.

Our layout comprises of three "module" boxes. When we say module box, they are constructed on a 1.2 m x .6 m box with two common rail lines.  The beauty of this is that you can connect to other people's module boxes and create a unique continuous railway. We recently displayed this concept at a local festival and the response we received was amazing.

A key point about our module boxes is that all of the points were hand made, and the scenery was completed by myself as well as my two sons Zac 11 and Damien 8.

We took the module concept a step further and created mini scenery modules which are interchangeable.

The above photo shows the module boxes in their entirety. The middle two tracks form a common rail lines which can be attached to other modules. For showing purposes, we built a loop behind the boxes meaning we could run our stock continuously. All of the points have been made by hand - no gigs used, all done by eye. These boxes were created by myself as well as my family with a large input from my sons Zac 11 and Damien 8. My wife is great at shopping at the $2.00 shop and has a knack for creative thinking. Who would have thought you could create wild long grass from wallpaper brushes. The man in the shop thought she was mad!

The buildings on the upper level are interchangeable and my boys are working on even more of them. We chose to do a zig-zag railway as it optimises the limitations in space when working in module format. From the rear, all of the points have been connected to slide switches and colour coded by section. This means that running the layout is virtually idiot proof.

Common sense prevails. My youngest son ran 3 trains continuously independently for hours on end. I think a few people got quite a shock when his little head popped up over the top. Both boys but particularly my eldest son contributed to a good percentage of the scenery, amazing where a child's imagination can take you.

Robert Anderson comments...

What an inspiration to everyone! I'm sure society wouldn't have half the problems if more families worked as a team like this. Congratulations and well done!!