Welcome to one of the few pages on the web dedicated to exclusively to South African Railways modelling.
Most of my stock is featured here, some modified and detailed, some still untouched. Most RTR items and kits are manufactured to HO scale (3.5mm/ft), however they are manufactured to run on 16.5mm gauge rail. "Standard" gauge in South Africa is 3' 6", which in this scale works out to be 12.25mm. 12mm track is now freely available, so I am in the process of converting my stock to run on this gauge. I don't mind the missing 0.25mm, as I am not too much of a rivet counter.
I run a mixture of stock. Some is RTR from Lima, most are resin or injection moulded kits produced by various individuals in South Africa. I even have a Frateschi Diesel that is supposed to be a model of the GE class 34. All of my goods stock runs on correct pattern fully sprung bogies. Click on the blue underlined list headings to see photos of my rolling stock.
All stock which I have so far got around to modifying have Kaydee #30 series couplers body mounted. I have found the #30 series to be much better suited to operation with 12mm wheelsets than the commonly used #5 coupler, as the #30 series has a much smaller draft box. Most have had vacuum brake hoses fitted where appropriate, and Kaydee air brake hoses where the prototype is not vacuum braked. The Lima diesel that has been detailed has had the pilot beam body mounted and coupler lift-bars fitted. 12mm wheelsets from Steam Era Models in Australia have been used on the stock, and these have been found to be most satisfactory.
Not much to say here really - I don't have one yet! I do plan on building a layout loosely based around the Mafikeng area, as this was the interchange between the Rhodesia Railways and South African Railways systems up to the end of the '70s. It will be quite interesting, as a lot of my stock never ran in the area, but my reasons for this is that I can run stock from both countries on the layout, as I intend to scratchbuild some RR stock at a later date.
This site will be updated whenever I acquire/build any new models, so keep coming back for a look. I have many ideas for scratchbuilt projects, but as I intend to market kits of some things, I can't say too much at the moment. I hope you enjoyed the site, please sign the guestbook, and let me know what you thought.
All images were produced using an Olympus Camedia 1400 digital camera. I'm not too good with fully automatic cameras, preferring my fully manual Canon SLR, so some of the images are a little flaky. Please excuse this, certain images will be updated as my skill level rises.
All pages in this hierarchy were produced using UNIX vi, the best editor in existence.
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