The club has had a few N Scale layouts since becoming a permanent fixture at the Railway Museum.

The club successfully exhibited Weepy Junction and Maple Deutsche at the AMRA(WA) Model Railway Show in June 2005 (see the gallery for pictures from the show). Although we didn’t win any prizes, we had a lot of fun and received a lot of positive feedback — especially about the quality of the scenery. We also took Maple Deutsche down to Albany in October 2005 for the Albany Hobby Expo. That was also a very successful and enjoyable exhibition — until nearly the whole crew came down with a gastro bug after it was over!

Weepy Junction

Weepy Junction is a small, portable N Scale layout (8m x 0.3m) consisting of two adjacent and interconnected shunting yards with a passenger station at one end and a fiddle yard at the other. The modular design is very lightweight and designed for easy transport.

This layout was the personal layout of past president Peter Tullis and he donated it to the club when his deteriorating health meant he could no longer enjoy it at home. “Weepy” came from one of George Sumner’s nicknames for Peter: “Wee-Pierre”, alluding to Peter’s height!

This layout is mothballed in storage for potential future use.

Maple Deutsche

Maple Deutsche was a large, modular layout designed for relatively easy transportation and exhibiting. The name came from the two main prototypes modelled by N Scale modellers in the group at the time: Canadian (Peter Tullis) and German (Garry West and Graham Reddin). The main station on the layout was called “Redwintul Park West” — a portmanteau of the surnames of the members of the group: Graham Reddin, Roger Winfield, Peter Tullis, Ross Parker, and Garry West.

After exhibiting the layout twice in one year, there was little interest within the group to once again undertake the huge effort it takes to dismantle, transport, re-assemble, operate for just a couple of days — then have to repeat the process to bring it all back again! To further exacerbate things, the layout was now ‘complete’ and there was no major work that could be done on it.

The group quickly realised its members are ‘builders’ not ‘operators’. There is much more satisfaction gained from building a new layout than simply operating an existing one — especially one in which there are some design shortcomings and compromises that simply cannot be fixed without starting again.

Hence, after a few years the decision was made to dismantle Maple Deutsche completely and start again with a larger (17m x 2m), permanently fixed N Scale layout with a high speed running line (for ICE, TGC or Japanese ‘Bullet’ trains), two continuous loops for normal passenger trains and a branch line and goods yard for freight trains.