Killawarra

The New South Wales Diesel Era Modelling Running Day

2019

Hi Guys

It has been a while since I have posted here on Killawarra. It has been a hard year for myself with a few challenges. I won't go into them but I want to talk about the NSWDEM annual running day which was held last Saturday 22nd June 2019.

Quite some time ago Dave Porter and myself started a Yahoo News Group called New South Wales Diesel Era Modelling. There was quite a few Yahoo Groups dedicated to Railway Modelling but they were not really catering for our needs as modellers and really had some rubbish non related stuff on them. NSWDEM was a private group and kept on focus by the moderators. The theme was NSW modelling 1975 to 1995.

As time went on Aaron Denning come on board and has been one of the main driving forces behind NSWDEM since. Dave and Aaron then carried NSWDEM over to Facebook and it has grown since with at last check 646 members. There is a great pool of knowledge on the group with member always happy to share tips and tricks with plenty of Q&A.

This brings us to the running day. A social gathering of members mostly organised by Aaron Denning. From memory this is a fourth annual run day which has been kindly hosted by the Epping Model Railway Club. The club providing the venue, a couple of exhibition layouts to run our trains on and a sausage sizzle for lunch. The door entry of $10.00 would go to the club for kindly offering their facilities for the day.

This year was a little different as we had an invited layout visiting called Stockinbingal from Wagga. The club also provided their layout Binalong which has featured at all the run days and has been a favourite with the Up line being DC and the down line DCC. Everyone could run on it. Stockinbingal was only DC so some members couldn't run on it. Over the day we had around 60 members come and enjoy the atmosphere.

A couple of other features for the day was a room setup for watching DVDs from our era of modelling and the Raffle. The Raffle has grown to quite a thing. Mostly thanks to the work of Aaron Denning. At the Rose Hill show a couple of weeks earlier Aaron went around to many of the retailers/producers and mustered up a number of raffle prizes for the run day. It has got to the point where there is basically a raffle prize for everyone that attends no matter how small it may be. This year it ranged from a 70 class, Pay Bus, packs of rollingstock, books, magazine subscriptions down to a container or small detail part. A very good effort on the part of Aaron and the sponsors of all this great stuff.

This photo by Aaron shows this years prize pool. All the big names in Australian modelling are there. Auscison/SDS/OTM/IDR/IFM/Austrains/SJM/KRM to name a few

This year I placed one of my models into the Raffle Prize Pool. This SDS NRY that I weathered up. Something a little different this year. I come away with an SDS NVJA, so I was pretty happy with that.

The next lot of photos, Aaron Denning has download directly the NSWDEM. He has given me permission to use them here in my Blog

The guys watching Video footage taken by members back in the day

Stockinbingal in Action

A short wheat train sitting in the up refuge at Binalong

A spoil train coming into Stockinbingal

The staging yard for Binalong

The tables set up between the layouts to help set up trains

Secret Men's Business

A X200 lost

A short Ballast sitting in the down refuge at Binalong

I really did enjoy the day. I spent most of my time running on Stockinbingal, talking to Rodney Smith who bought the layout to the run day. Rodney also by chance won the NRY that I weathered in the raffle, so I was please with that. One thing that I did note was a few of our model producers were on site enjoying themselves. Steve Pracy from SDS was there, he also helped greatly with the event by paying for the hall hire for the day so the Epping club wouldn't have to. He also was behind Stockinbingal being on hand. I noted also Craig Hill from OTM's. Ian Ratcliffe from IDR. Keiran Ryan from KRM and of coarse Aaron Denning from IFM's. If there was others I just cannot think of them for now. It was great having them there as plenty of ideas etc could be bounced around and they could see their wares in action.

Here is some more of Aarons photos showing some of the models on show