Program for 2010

The fifteenth annual Modelling the Railways of South Australia Convention will be held at the Medical Lecture Rooms of the Flinders Medical Centre on Saturday 11th September 2010, using the larger of the two lecture theatres. We are back to the second Saturday of the month due mainly to the fact that the Lecture Theatre had already been booked for another function on the 18th.

The convention area can be reached from the southern end of the hospital. Go to the car park at the southern end, and then follow our signs to the area used for the convention. Included in the convention fee is morning and afternoon teas, a hot lunch in the canteen, and approximately 180- 200 pages of Convention notes which will again include a number of colour photos. Three-ring folders are available to file the notes in and, together with previous years' notes including an updated index, they form a considerable reference library of around 2000 pages.

Topics tentatively listed to be presented in 2010 include the following:

The Wilmington Line
John Evans is well known to regular attendees at the convention and is a keen South Australian railways historian. He will continue his series of talks on the South Australian Narrow Gauge lines, this time on the Wilmington Line. The information presented to the Convention from his previous talks has now resulted in two books being published entitled "Proceed to Hawker" and "Proceed to Quorn". There is a lot of additional information and photos in his books compared with what we have in our notes. John also presented an extremely interesting and comprehensive paper on SAR station buildings at one of our previous conventions.

720 class 2-8-4 Berkshire Locomotives
The South Australian Railways 720 class Locos were an interesting group of big power Locos on the SAR, but perhaps one of the less successful classes. Find out if they were designed to work on some of the lighter lines in South Australia. Did something go wrong with the arithmetic, or was it in the engineering for the locos ended up being far to heavy for the majority of lightly laid lines. Rob Burford will continue his series on the larger power locos of the SAR and tell us what really happened.

The Moping Branch
Kev Loughheads layout took fifty years to build and well over 100,000 hours of work.
A layout which compared favorably with anything anywhere in the world has now unfortunately passed into history. But before it disappeared, at least eight hours of video were made of the layout including interviews with some of the people who operated on it. A full contingent of operators for the layout was 15 per session! Don Bishop will present some photographic highlights of what was, a truly amazing South Australian Layout.

A review of a number of models of South Australian steam locos
The irrepressible master modeller from Victoria, Mr Frank Kelly will again amaze us with his modelling skills of Steam Locos. During the course of his presentation, he will discuss some of the problems he encountered when building the models. Included in his collection of scratch built OO scale locos are the following locos or classes of loco:- SAR No 1, Gd, I, K, M, O P, Q, Rx, S ,X, Y, 720, Sandfly, Coffee Pot.

Step Down Platforms
Architect Rod Barrington will give a presentation on those structures peculiar to a period that just survived the steam era. Our notes will include a plan as well as some photos of these wooden platforms, some shelter sheds, and other paraphernalia associated with the small non attended stations.

Building Resin Structure kits
Ross Hurley and Hugh Williams will demonstrate how to put together polyurethane kits, how to make a master pattern, and will briefly discuss again, types of rubber, types of casting materials including white metal, and where these materials can be purchased in South Australia.

Indian Pacific Cars
Kim and Stuart from Melbourne intend to present a paper detailing the Stainless Steel Indian Pacific cars. This will be a follow up to earlier presentations on E stock wooden cars and Streamlined Overland Cars

Other Information
As usual, a number of commercial stands will be at the Convention as has been the case in previous years.

Attendees are encouraged to bring along any models of their handiwork, especially models with a distinctive South Australian flavor. Hopefully there might be a few more models of different classes of Steam loco, (please bring 720's if you have one), railway station buildings and signal cabins, since a number of white metal kits have been produced for SAR steam locos and since we have featured plans for some station buildings and signal boxes over the previous years.

As in previous years, the odd extra article might appear in the notes, although not necessarily a topic for a presentation. Line diagrams of Commonwealth Railways passenger cars will be printed, to supplement a previous paper given on these cars.
We are hoping to be able to print, another of Peter Manning's great loco plans together with a small article to compliment the plan. The 2009 notes totaled 240 pages including about 30 with color. Don't expect quite this many pages in 2010.