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This story is the original story of the Brindabella Railway, and was printed in much this form in the Australian Model Railway Magazine. With my decision to change my business name from Brindabella Model Railways to Moreton Bay Model Railways, I now need to change the name of the railway described here from the Brindabella Railway to the Moreton Bay Railway. The necessary changes to do this are quite small, but have not yet been done. The changes to my model rolling stock may take somewhat longer!
Setting the Scene
Like most of us, I have been interested in trains since early childhood. Growing up in Hobart, most books and magazines readily available at the time were English, so it was perhaps inevitable that my early interests would lie towards that part of the world. The local railways did not seem especially interesting and US railways were of no interest at all. In my later childhood steam also remained king as the object of most of my interests. This all changed one early evening in Devonport in the late 1970s when quite by accident I witnessed an empty log train stopping at the station, performing its safe working operations, with the driver exchanging a simple but appreciated wave. The train then headed west out of town and into the night, trailing a lengthy load of empties, and the sounds, sights and smells of railways which were here and now and the promise of tomorrow.
It was that precise moment, that wave, that contact with contemporary railways that were here rather than there, now rather than then, which changed my interests completely: from being interested in the past I became more interested in the present and the future; from being interested in steam I became more interested in diesels, from being interested in English railways I became more interested in Tasmanian and other Australian railways.
Through all this I dabbled with model railways, usually picking up what was readily available, although I did experiment with some S scale polyester casting of TGR equipment. Eventually though, a combination of study and not being able to really model what I was interested in saw my modelling activity wane, although not completely die. My interest in railways was channelled into my other great passion of photography.
After completing studies I found myself working in Canberra for a couple of years, which is where I saw my first significant model railway exhibition. Here were all manner of models, but it was a simple yet effective layout which showed that basic track-plans can be very effective when well scenicked. At the end of that day, my interest in becoming an active modeller again flickered and was rekindled.
Of course, deciding to start modelling again, and actually being able to do it were two different things. For example, I had to face the fact that I was renting a unit and likely to continue doing so for at least the medium term, so any grand plans had to be quickly curtailed. I would only have a limited budget. Space constraints suggested I should stick with N gauge, even though this would limit the possibilities of modelling Australian prototypes. Lack of time and scratch-building skills stopped me from modelling anything other than what was available on the market. One way or another though, I did want to be counted amongst those who model Australian N scale.
During the few years I was not modelling but was seriously photographing railways, I started to appreciate the quality of many of the contemporary US railway photographers, and through them an interest in US railways. The effect of this on my modelling ambitions was that I also found myself being strongly attracted to US diesels, especially Alcos and the more recent GEs. Coupled to this, so to speak, was not being totally satisfied with either the range or the level of detailing of the models of the Australian diesels available at the time. This led me to decide to use models of US diesels where possible which gave me the level of quality I wanted as a standard.
Now, having got this far, you may be wondering how I could possibly reconcile everything, and still claim to be modelling Australian prototype. Undoubtedly this is a very fair question - and one which I grappled with for some time. After all, simply repainting an Atlas RS11 and calling it a NSW 45 class would hardly do, even if the end result did run extremely well! It was at about this stage that it occurred to me modelling Australian railways does not actually mean having to model either NSW or Victoria - which in the late 1980s was about all that was available on the market.
The solution eventually became very clear: model a fictional railway set somewhere in Australia. At this point I could have opted to model a fictional extension of one of the existing systems, perhaps as some form of joint line, but this did not solve my problem of wanting to be free to use at least some US locomotives. The next logical step was to then decide it would be a completely fictional new system.
This decision was nothing short of liberating: I could strive to set my models in an unmistakably Australian setting, use what I liked from the market and use what I deemed fit for locomotives. As it turned out, this decision also led down the path of having to give serious thought to a number of “what if “ questions, and a whole new dimension of research.
Of course, modelling fictional railways is common in the US which is perhaps not surprising given its immensely rich tapestry of railway history, but seems quite uncommon in an Australian context.
Now, if I was going to be the self-appointed CEO of some fictional railway system I wanted one which had a bit of “mass” and was not some minor off-shoot tucked away in the forests eking out a meagre existence. No, I wanted a system which, in my mind at least, was a major transport provider to the region it served. Where then to set such a fictional medium sized railway in Australia, when our railway history has been almost totally dominated by the state railways? What rationale could I come up with which made at least some sense?
I let this problem lie for a while but at a very early stage decided on the name: the Brindabella Railway. My very simple reason for choosing this name is that having lived in Canberra for a couple of years, I grew to love the sound of that word: Brindabella. A further move at the end of the 1980s to Brisbane focused my attention on the Sunshine State, especially the landscapes and the architecture, but I decided to keep the name.
Thinking of ideas to give the Brindabella Railway a home proved to be an enjoyable experience. An early front runner was to create a seventh island state of Brindabella located a couple of hundred kilometres off the northern NSW coast - perhaps a sub-tropical antipodean Atlantis, although this always seemed to be pushing things a bit too far and eventually sank again beneath the waves of the Pacific Ocean. Another strong contender for some time was to have Brisbane as the capital of the colony and later state of Brindabella, taking in much of northern NSW and southern Queensland. In this scheme, one of the coastal towns of central Queensland would probably have become the capital of Queensland but I was not confident they were ready for such civic responsibility. In any event, by this stage I was also interested in exploring the possibility of having a successful private railway so this idea also dropped out.
Finally, a look at the map suggested that if a major traffic source was created in the eastern border region between NSW and Queensland, some interesting political scenarios could have emerged in the late 1880s. The solution to this possible problem may have been to cede responsibility to a private railway as the colonial Governments of NSW and Queensland proved unable to resolve their jealousies. Such a railway might then have formed the core of a system based along the border and serving the far north of NSW and southern Queensland. This is the option I eventually chose, but to make it really work I decided that I needed to provide a good historical basis for the railway. In doing so, I ended up using some of the themes of Australia’s early railway and financial history.
For me, the answer is definitely yes. Certainly it has been more overall effort to get it to this stage than had I modelled one of the state systems - but it has been precisely this effort which has been so rewarding to me. Granite Rock is the end result of about a decade of mulling over possibilities, learning about local history and trying to blend it all into something which is different, but at least plausible.
I guess at the end of the day the question is would I do it all again, if I was starting from scratch now? Again, although some things would be done differently, the answer is definitely an emphatic yes.