I’m a 60-year-old expat American who’s called Australia home since marrying a Perth girl 32 years ago. My brothers and I had a lot of fun with Lionel O gauge as kids. For many years our Dad worked on 23rd Street, in Manhattan, not far from Lionel’s NYC headquarters. He was known to take the odd detour on the way home from work when birthdays rolled around!
Now that I’m in a position to indulge in a second childhood, I’m building a G scale layout. I could lie and say it’s for my grandsons, but all of you hard-core train blokes will have your own special words for that (mine would start with B, end with T, and have six letters in between). For starters, it will be indoors, roughly 11’ X 12’, in an empty space (well, it’s empty now) that connects the main house to an extension we put on when the kids were teenagers. Locksmith’s coming today to set it up with keys matching the house; until now, we’ve never bothered with locks on those outside doors. Later on, I can expand into the garden through the doors and/or the four windows.
Ray’s recent post about the heat in San Diego was interesting. Since Perth summers make San Diego look like Alaska, the same issue needs addressing here. To give you an idea, we had to pull the solid wooden door off the north-facing wall when we built the place - the heat warped it! We put a steel door on instead, and that did the trick. We’ll now plan to tint the four windows that look onto the train area; it’ll chop the UV big-time, and provide more security by making the glass difficult to shatter.
Terry, thanks for your review of the Dash-9 - very interesting. I look forward to chatting with all you blokes, sharing ideas, and - who knows? I occasionally travel to the US, and some of you might wander down to the good side of the planet some day!
Perth is probably not as wicked as Darwin.