Twigg Rebuilt
On the weekend of 15/16 August 1992, a young girl (Mandie) and her father (me) took Twigg to its first exhibition. Another August, 26 years later, saw Twigg being exhibited at the AMRA (Vic) Caulfield exhibition. While Mandie and I have done most of the exhibiting over the years, my wife Carol and our younger daughter Kylie have also participated.
Over the years we made some changes to Twigg, such as extra people and flowering plants in the gardens of the houses, along with a fresh layer of scatter in differing colours as the existing cover faded. Plus, the total numbers of locomotives and rolling stock available for use on the layout have continued to grow.
Immediately after the 2017 Caulfield exhibition, we gave thought to the following year and assumed we would receive an invitation to exhibit. We did. We decided we would offer Twigg. Little Chipping, described in AMRM Issue 332 (October 2018), had been exhibited at the Caulfield exhibition in 2017 and Leafy Bay, described in AMRM Issue 214 (February 1999), in 2015. We had a break in 2016 – Mandie had her second child earlier that month and I was recovering from a knee operation!
We took a long look at Twigg and realised it would require significant work for us to be happy to exhibit it in 2018. One option was to start from scratch with new baseboards and track. The baseboards had been well built by my late father-in-law and did not need replacing and the track overall was still in good condition. We decided to retain the baseboards and track and renew the scenery.
Some Background
An article on Twigg appeared in AMRM Issue 182 (October 1993). The track plan was taken from the English magazine, Model Railways, and was originally designed for a layout size of 1.8m x 300mm. We increased this to 2m x 450mm, partly because we wanted some scenery as well as railway, but also because a 1m length baseboard (our 2m baseboard is two 1m sections, folded) will fit in most cars.
Initially we used a system of cassettes to change trains,
