The Kotanga Valley.

[Annie]

The Kotanga Valley and its tramways are going to be built in my bedroom, which says two things: (a) I have a large bedroom with space to spare, and (b) it's still going to be a bit of a squeeze to put a 7/8 scale tramway and its surroundings in.

Where I live in the central North Island of New Zealand had an absolute network of tramways serving sawmills, gold mining, coal mining, river protection works & etc during the late 1800s and some tramways remained in existance until the 1970s. Though by the 1970s those that remained were shadows of their former selves and were limping along from day to day with heavily patched equipment amongst the rusting remains of their former glory.
The nice thing about living where I do is being able to actually see some of the sites and there are plenty of local museums with excellent photographic records of daily life in some of the small towns serving some of these industries that have long since disappeared.

Because I like a touch of whimsey the major export out of the Kotanga Valley is wooden coathangers from the local timber mills and ready to use postholes from the open cast posthole mine in the valley. The indoor layout is mostly going to be built around the 2ft gauge timber tramway, but I may add a short spur from the Ewings monorail line that serves the posthole mine. The Ewings monorail line is going to be a future 'out in the garden' project, but it will be nice to have an indoor spur for test purposes.

Baseboards are going to be cheap panel doors from the local hardware emporium and the largest size available will be used to build the station and yard at Kotanga. This is going to be my starting point and the rest of the line will meander around the available space in my bedroom from there. I have a fair bit of new tinplate railed track by Bachmann and Buddy-L which I purchased cheap because nobody really wants it as it's no good for outside use. It's just fine for what I'm doing of course.
Beyond the station board and off the 'main line' the trackwork will be laid on wooden sleepers with salvaged Hornby, Lionel and Marx '0' gauge rail coz I've got heaps of it.

Buildings will be the typical for the time and area being mostly built from rough sawn planks and corrugated iron. Even a small 7/8 scale building is big, so I'm most probably going to have to use a little selective compression and forced perspective to get some things to fit and still look good.

Typical street view in one of the now vanished small towns in the area on which I'm basing the Kotanga Valley.


Typical tramway track and surrounding landscape.


Typical small sawmill in bush setting.


Rumored to be the posthole mine near Kotanga.

[Annie]

This is typical of the small halt type station buildings used durig the steam era. I will be building one of these for Kotanga.


Other period photos I'm going to find useful.


This photo was taken not so far away from where I live actually. It looks nothing like this now.

[Pretoria]

Just dig a hole, plant it, and there we go -- a posthole ready for use !

Wonderful. Where can I buy one ?

[Narrow Minded]

Just dig a hole, plant it, and there we go -- a posthole ready for use !

Wonderful.  Where can I buy one ?

I last saw some in a shop which also sold spirit level bubbles!

Looking forward to the build Annie!

[Pretoria]

I last saw some in a shop which also sold spirit level bubbles!

Please be careful -- beware cheap bubbles -- they need to come with a calibration certificate or they really are no good. Only buy the best.

Sorry to hijack your post Annie, but we must be vigilant against cheap imports.

[Annie]

The idea for a ready to use posthole came from one of those silly conversations that arise when friends and beer are in the same place. We had gathered together to help out a friend who had just purchased a block of rural land and with the day's work behind us and the level of beer in our glasses going down somebody suggested that it would be really handy if you could cut up a big hole into smaller holes and then when a posthole was needed all you had to do was tip it out of the box and there it was all ready to go.

So many years later when I was trying to think of an industry for the Kotanga Valley that had the right amount of whimsey to it a posthole mine just seemed logical somehow

[Dwayne]

Annie, love the idea of the posthole mine.

Seems like most large scalers in my sector of planet Bob are too interested in throwing miles of track onto the ground and running the largest diesels and longest trains they possibly can. Heck, most still hook up wires to the rails. Very few have any inclination towards whimsical.

Over here, the yard is nothing more than a ground level table top with layouts that mimic N & HO scale layouts with track running everywhere as their trains chase their cabooses. The garden aspect rarely is intigrated with the trains.

I guess that's why this forum appeals to me as much as it does. An over riding theme that I notice is the lack of real estate in the UK for layouts which translates into smaller layouts that are given a purpose. Layout and garden meld together.

Which ultimately is my approach. I'm drawing upon the work and layouts displayed on this forum to be applied to my layout. Even though I have a half-acre of real estate to play with, the plan is to have the layout "disappear" into the garden, keep the amount of track to a single strand running from Point A to Point B, have small engines pulling short strings of cars and add a bit of whimsy to the entire thing so that I'm having fun. Because I'm gone from home more than at home K.I.S.S. must be a primary goal.

[IrishPeter]

Annie,
I love the Posthole Mine idea - just barmy enough to be awesome!  I am glad to see that NZ bush tramways are even more "feral" than my Irish ones, though some of the station architecture is the same.

Dwayne,
I know what you mean about the big trains and the bid layouts.  Most of the large scale guys around here (North-central AZ) are of the same mind.  They are not happy unless they are running fifty boxcars behind a lash-up of F7s, or 24 gondolas behind a Mudhen!  I am regarded as a weirdo with no piece of stock longer than 18 inches, no locomotive bigger than an 0-4-0, and a fleet of 4-wheelers.  A long train on the Skebawn and Castleknox is 9 four wheelers, and even that is a tight fit for the loop at Skebawn!

Peter in AZ

[Dr. Bond of the DVLR]

If you quarry lumps of stuff and end up with a wacking great pit, surely if you quarry holes you'll end up with a mound?!

[Narrow Minded]

I think you're looking too deep (or too high!) Mr B!

[IrishPeter]

Oh dear - you are being far too "English" in believing that 2+2 must inevitably equal 4, whereas as any Celt knows it may equal 3, 5 or nothing at all depending on the circumstances and who is asking. Maybe the physics of Post Hole Mines is the same.



Peter in AZ

[Annie]

Posthole mines can be tricky though and require a good deal of skill from the miners so that continually taking away nothing (ie a posthole) from nothing (the big hole in the ground that is the mine) doesn't cause a collapse in the space/time continuim and they end up with more nothing than they started with.

Postholes once safely boxed up still need to be handled with care. There is still a good deal of ill feeling in the district over the sudden disappearance of the pub at Waimoana due to the carelessness of a tipsy cart driver.

[Annie]

Dwayne, Irish Peter, I completely agree about a railway being seen to have an actual purpose and also being a part of the landscape. With the Kotanga Tramway I'm hoping to capture some of that nestled in the landscape look even though I'm going to be working in a fairly small space.
I was interested in Irish railways at one time and I still have a fair bit of plan material about for rolling stock, locos & etc. In the end though it was the bush tramways of my own country that won out, but I will comment that there are more than just a few strong similarities when it comes to rolling stock design, buldings and the like.

Just on a side note I did belong to a 45mm gauge society before I moved away to the small rural town where I now live. Most of the members owned expensive plastic locos and rolling stock by the usual suspects, and these operated by strange and wonderful electronic control systems that I couldn't begin to understand. My own locos were mostly based on parts from toy shop battery trainsets with such delights as wooden cabs with corrugated iron and white metal castings used freely. My locos were also setup to operate by hand in the cab methods which is something I really like.
Well being New Zealand we get a lot of rain in certain seasons and by the law of averages it would often rain during meetings. Which naturally enough brought the expensive locos with magic electronic contol to a sparky and sudden halt. Frantic rescues would be made to get these locos and their trains under cover and I would get horrified glances because I never brought my locos in if it rained and left them to get on with it which they did very well.

[Annie]

My one regret with my large scale trains is that I sold off all my steam stuff I had due to being ill and needing money to pay bills. Most of it was Mamod traction engine parts, but there was some homebuilt, Bowman and MSS parts amongst it.
I particularly regret selling the bush tram lokey I'd built before I had a chance to get it running, but hopefully I'll be able to build up another one once I find another boiler. The lokey might look odd with just one wheel set being driven, but that's because the as yet unbuilt 4 wheel tender was going to have its wheelsets connected to the lokey drive axle by chain as well.

[Pretoria]

Oooooh! Half a Shay. Wonderful. More, more, more. Please !

[Annie]

Unfortunately that's all the photos I have of my bush lokey and with it now sold there are no more.

The steam engine itself is a 'Unit' and they are designed so they can be joined together to make a twin or triple or four cylinder (or more) engine. My plan was to get my lokey running and then add another engine unit to make it a twin cylindered loco.

The engines can be found here ...... http://www.chasteam.com/unitsteamenginekits.htm

[benchmark]

Whow,that's one of the most ingenious uses of a mamod boiler and firebox , well done.

[Annie]

I'm sick in bed at the moment in training for the NZ Olympic coughing team at the moment so don't get too close to your monitor ........

Fortunately it's given me time to plan out some aspects of the Kotanga Tramway and the most important one is that I won't build it to 7/8 scale after all, but will stay with 16mm. My bush tram loco 'Emily' which is based around a Locolines 'Mammoth' kit was originally built to 16mm, but on 45mm gauge. To make a 7/8 scale engine of her I'd have to rebuild the cab at least and I've decided that I don't want to do that.

One side of Emily was built by Barclays and the other by Bagnall according to her makers plates Must sort that out sometime.........


Most of the wooden tramway wagons I've built so far will be fine at 16mm, the only one that won't is my wooden side tipper, but that was built to 1/12 in the first place so I can't complain. The wagons I've built already scale out to being 6ft or so wide in 16mm which is fine.



The part of the layout that would've been most affected is the buildings and when you're working in not much space to start with the difference in size between a shed in 7/8 and the same shed in 16mm is worth having.

So there you are the Kotanga Tramway is a 16mm scale line and now that I've got that sorted I can get on with things properly.

[AFGadd]

I've just read this topic and felt the urge to type.
I adore your ideas Annie, it's very important to maintain a sense of perspective when modelling anything!!!

As for the post-hole mine, well that could have come straight from my late fathers idea box.
His own particular cause, and the basis for many layouts, was a Treacle Mine.

I'll continue to watch this post with interest, mostly because I'm interested so see what design of wagon the miners use to bring the un-cut holes to the surface and transport them to the hole-trimming & packing sheds?

On a more personal note, can you give me rough ideas of the size of holes the company supply and the costs involved in shipping to the UK?
Also, what shape of holes will the company be supplying? We have some particularly awkward spaces on my garden railway and would be interested in holes made to measure....

Very best regards,

[Dwayne]

In this age of green-ness, can existing post holes be recycled? If so, how does one extract a post hole from the ground? How should they be stored until future use? And if new ones were needed to replace damaged holes do they come in different sizes? Is there a discount for bulk shipments?