Friends of the Rail Forum

Somewhere on this forum I mentioned once that I have been collecting odd bits of N scale kit in preparation for an African-themed model railway whenever I get the chance to settle down somewhere long enough to begin building it.

Well, that moment is now in the foreseeable future as we have bought land outside Nairobi and hope soon to begin building a house. What's more, she who must be obeyed has decreed that I can have a model railway room in the new house.

However during a recent visit to my sister in England, we were looking at my brother-in-law's OO scale layout which my sister has contributed to by building some of the houses and scenery, and my elder sister said to me quite bluntly, "You're not so young any more! How are you going to get your fingers and your eyesight around those tiny N scale models?" My wife weighed in and said she would quite like to get involved in the scenery just as my sister has done, a great surprise as she has never shown any interest in anything rail-related in the past although she has always tolerated my own obsession with it, but that she couldn't see herself doing it in N scale.

We talked it through and realised that the main reason for choosing N was the expectation of not having much space to build a layout, but now we could plan a model railway room of a reasonable size, that reason no longer seemed so compelling.

So the decision was made. I handed all my N scale kit over to my brother-in-law for him to sell the locos and anything else valuable on eBay and get rid of the rest at a model railway swap-meet, and we have now started planning for an African-themed model railway in HO scale. It's still a few years away but, as the South Africans would say, we've now made a plan.

Now the question is 16.5mm or 12mm :-)

Indeed! But I have to confess that we will probably take the coward's way out and use 16.5 mm, as I'm not sure my thumbs, eyesight and skill are up to the amount of scratch-building and/or conversions which 12 mm would entail!

Well John, you can always model Gautrain (a world class Afican railway?) in HO at 1:87 and then the rail gauge will be almost correct. You could possibly modify models of UK Electrostar or Turbostar units to use as a base. Hmmm. but one problem, they are likely only available in OO (1:76), not HO. That means the 16.5 mm rail gauge will again be technically incorrect.

I think I'll stick to the real thing. In 1:1 scale, no such conundrums to face!

Gautrain is far too modern for the period we want to model. We're looking at a 1980s feel, with steam and diesel running side by side. We can represent in model form some of the famines and civil wars which we have experienced, plus lots of very interesting old road vehicles, going way back beyond that period as forty- or fifty-year old vehicles can still be seen in regular use in rural Africa (indeed I currently drive a Land Rover which is 45 years old, and I've seen 1940s- and '50s-era lorries still working in South Sudan).