I recently had contact with the nephew of our oldest church member, who passed away 18 months ago.  Ian lives in Australia and turned out to be a modeller (but not N gauge.)  I sent him a few shots of an ESNG meeting, and he sent me the following account of his modelling exploits.

Hi Jon,

Thanks for sending these photos, great to see. This is a large layout for N gauge but I see you can run full length trains which is great.

My first model railway in Australia was an OO layout in the garden. I was warned that the track wouldn’t last in the sun. I had the occasional track buckle, just like the real thing, but ants on the line caused a terrible adhesion problem and squashed ants were hard to clean off the loco wheels! It was the baseboards, just a few inches off the ground, that eventually gave in to the sun and it has since been dismantled.

We suffer from a lot of reliability problems (cat hairs especially) but are yet to experience the squashed ant issue.  Mind you, in Oz I’d be worried about spiders and snakes on the track, too…

I’ve now got two model railways indoors. An OO model of Ashburton in Devon, almost complete:

And an O gauge model of Kings Cross stabling point under construction:

Both look excellent.