Model Trains and Things

Every model railroader worth his salt has a junk box … that place to drop broken bits and pieces that may be useful one day … kit parts that you didn’t actually included in the kit when you built it … odd gizmos that you can turn into something else … you know, junk that’s just too valuable to toss out.

Well here is the perfect project for a whole bunch of things you just might have in your junk box.

This photo was taken not all that far from where I live in Hervey Bay and the subject of the photo is the front gate of a property on the outskirts of town. Now what’s on that property is interesting enough … old railway houses, an timber railway station, several old goods sheds … but the gate is definitley interesting too.

On the gate posts are two finials from the top of old signal posts. The gates themselves are almost certainly the sides and ends from a cane wagon. They look similar to the sides of cane wagons used at several mills quite a long way to the north of here but they could have been from as close as Childers or Bundaberg.

And then there are the wheels … they’re quite large and they have a flange on them so they could have come from a loco.

And there you have it … a perfect excuse to raid your junk box. You could put something like this just about anywhere you have a road on your layout … just have a track winding away from the gate and disappearing off into the distance and you don’t even have to worry about any farm buildings … and it would work in just about any scale.