Shelf Island

Hi Richard,

A great review and a wonderful looking (& performing) model. It's now truly hard to resist!

Cheers,

John.

I agree, some locos just have that X factor. In fact, there's an idea  for model railway event 

On 05/03/2019 at 17:27, Mikkel said:

I agree, some locos just have that X factor. In fact, there's an idea  for model railway event 

 

A most thought-provoking comment.

 

When I visit a railway, I expect to see some familiar things and I hope to see something a bit out of the ordinary. For Shelf Island, as a British territory with through workings from Great Britain, I need to capture a 'look', in which most of the trains are British; and all of the trains can reasonably co-exist at the chosen time (currently, 2012).

 

For both objectives, there is a slippery slope of introducing too many appealing but incoherent foreign prototypes. For the passenger stock, everything is British. For freight, I think I should aim for around 70% British, 20% Continental ferry/channel tunnel stock, and 10% built or modified by the railway's own workshops. For the engines and self-powered vehicles,I have, amongst the British items, one Norwegian locomotive (a Di8, which works in British industry), an Austrian tram (on hire from Blackpool) and now one French shunter.

 

For this scenario, I can imagine picking up an Ian Allan book  "The Railways of Shelf  Revisited" and the whole thing still looking believable: "the railway still runs its Moyse 32TDE, unique on railways of Great Britain but renowned for its robustness. Indeed, when Gaston-Moyse closed in the 1970s, one of the primary reasons cited was a lack of sales because their engines were so well-built. Prototypes from the 1930s were still in service around the World".

 

But it is a slippery slope. I also have an Alco S1, supposedly bought from the Steel Company of South Wales, but really I perceive this as the predecessor to the Di8. I can run one or the other but not both.

 

I have just bought an Austrian personnel carrier, the X.625 by Liliput. This is useful to me because it is DCC-ready; the Bachmann Wickham trolley for 00 is tolerably oversize but nigh-impossible to convert to DCC. I think, I can get away with the X.625 if I move the exhaust from the side to one end, and repaint it in yellow to match the other civil engineering vehicles. But this is probably the limit of foreign items for the railway as I imagine it in 2012, unless I gather up trains for an earlier period.

Edited March 8, 2019 by 47137