Wardell Station welcomes you

Wardell Station welcomes you
Wardell Station late 1950s

Saturday 31 October 2015

Back to 1955

This month on the 21st October marked, Back to the Future day, the day Marty Mcfly went to 2015.  Being a avert Back to the Future fan I thought it would be appropriate to see how my layout would be set in 1955.


In 1955, the trams have long gone, buses have replaced trams at Trafalgar st, Petersham. The overhead wiring has disappeared and work is ongoing to asphalt over the tram tracks. Car traffic is slowly increasing with the reduced bus service.

Asphalt of Tramway commenced
As shown in the above photo, scenery work has commenced with the tramway work and footpath complete for some parts of the layout mainly the Crystal St bridge and the intersection of Trafalgar st, Petersham. There is still a large part of Trafalgar street that is still not fully complete.

The method I used for completing the tramway was using premixed plaster, Boral Total Joint Finish that came in a large plastic tub. I covered this on either side of the tracks and covered to the height of the sleepers. Although not my original idea, it was a recommendation from another tram modeller on TDU.


I then cut strips of Super fibre mesh cloth and laid this on before I put the second coat of premixed plaster to raise the level of the road to rail height.


When dry I sanded the plaster smooth and painted it matt black to represent asphalt.
For the area between the rails and between the two tracks I used 400 grit sandpaper that I previously used for my station platform and cut it to the appropriate radius and size.

Between the rails I tried to use 2mm styrene and then gluing the sandpaper on top of the styrene however I found that with the Hong Kong tram there was no sufficient clearance so I used the sandpaper without any additional thickness.

Between the two tracks I cut cardboard in appropriate widths and lengths and glued the sandpaper on it for

Footpaths and concrete roads
The footpaths were made from 3mm styrene thick with grooves cut every 1.5 cm to represent concrete slabs. These were then painted in concrete colour.
The concrete roads were made using Busch concrete plates which are printed cardboard sheets of weathered cardboard. These come in two sheet packs with four rows of concrete slabs per sheet. I used one row wide concrete slabs to represent the left hand lane of the road.

Here the Delorean heads back to 1985 after passing Biff's car which hit the manure truck.