Wombat Creek Tramways

With my job I knew it was a matter of time before I would get Covid-19. Now my time is up and I will spend 7 days isolating at home. Fortunately my symptoms are quite mild. Mild enough to do a little modelling.

Margaret finally decided the lawn was too long and needed a mow. She didn’t get far, though, before she realised mowing was too hard and retired to the hammock. Meanwhile her son Tom did a bit of cricket practice and scored a perfect six. Unfortunately the ball went through one of the windows in the tram shed. Tom is quickly hiding in the cubby house. His sister Sarah wants to follow him, but she is unsure if she can climb the ladder.

Three days work and the control panel for the tramways is almost finished. Only the loop around the Big Nugget Mine is missing. The final position of the tracks has to be determined depending on the design of the bridge over the narrow gauge railway.

Obviously the black lines are the tracks. The red push buttons control the points. Some points are still not connected. The black push buttons control the power to the tram-stops. The tracks are under constant power and the trams will come to a stop, unless the black buttons are activated. The slide switches are normally on, but they make it possible to stop a tram between stops.

The track down the slope towards the Explosives Factory has been laid. It is not yet wired up, so the trams aren’t running yet. The track is not embedded in a road and will need to be ballasted.

The tram connection to the Explosives Factory is inspired by the trams at the once isolated Footscray system in Melbourne. As seen on the photo from Melbourne Tram Museum, the T class No 180 is showing Explosives Factory in the destination box.

n the Maribyrnong/Footscray area there used to be a factory complex consisting of the Explosives, Ammunition, Ordnance and Pyrotechnic Factories. They were involved in productions for the Australian Defence Forces. During WW2 the factories operated around the clock 365 days a year.
Of the 8000 strong workforce 52 % were women and many of them lived locally. They used the trams to and from work. With trams every 7 minutes day and night they didn’t have to wait long for the next tram.

Originally the destinations for the trams were listed as the factory names, Explosives Factory, Ammunition Factory, Ordnance Factory and Pyrotechnic Factory, but after the Japanese bombing of Darwin 12 February 1942 the Commonwealth Authorities ordered the signs changed by the end of the month. Apparently to make it less obvious for spies where to find the factories. The destinations would be ‘Special A’, ‘Special B’ and ‘Special E’. To make life even harder for an eventual spy ‘Special A’ went to the Explosives Factory and ‘Special E’ went to the Ammunition Factory. How the Pyrotechnic Factory was signed is unknown.

The products from the Explosives Factory in Wombat Creek are of course destined for the mining industry and the trams will not arrive at the factory every seven minutes 24 hours a day.

The photo shows the latest track work at the Tramways. The two parallel points are the turnouts towards the loop around the Big Nugget Mine. The points at the front connects to the track towards the Explosives Factory. This track will be on an decline/incline, which will be rather steep. The greatest gradient on the tramways in Melbourne is 1:8 (some resources state 1:6). At Wombat Creek it will probably be around 1:10 or a bit less. A trial run with three trams showed no issues going up-hill.

Planning further work on the Tramways is rather complicated. The loop can’t be finished before part of the track for the mining train is done. This can’t be done before the creek is in place. Nothing can be tested before the control panel is extended. Where to start?

You will always try not to cast any shadows on you background panel, but they can be rather dramatic. Just look at the shadows created by my work lamp.

After a holiday away from Wombat Creek I have worked on the trackbed for the final part of Wombat Creek Tramways – the big loop around the Big Nugget Mine. The sloping trackbed to the left of the loop leads down to the Explosives Factory in the background. I will need to test the trams on the slope to determine, how steep it will be. Because part of the ‘mine line’ (see Wombat Creek Consolidated Mines Pty Ltd) will pass under the tramway, track laying will commence after tracks for the before mentioned line are in place.

The last few weeks have seen little progress on the extension of Wombat Creek Tramways. The last points has arrived and the turnout towards the ‘Explosives Factory Line’ has been put together. And from here work has stalled!

The original idea was to have the gold mine in the middle, but a line-up of the points for the narrow gauge railway showed a better position in the lower left hand corner and the sawmill in the middle. However I was concerned for the delicate works of the poppet head so near the edge. Fortunately (well, sort of fortunately) there is not sufficient room for the sawmill in the middle, so it is back to the original layout again, but…

I will need to put part of the narrow gauge track down before I do the ‘upper level’ tracks for the trams. I had hope I could wait, but it will be too complicated to do track work under the bridges with the tram tracks. So works have stalled until I get hold of some lengths of narrow gauge track.

The extension to Wombat Creek will serve as a workbench for a while, but it is difficult not to plan for the future tracks for both the trams and the narrow gauge tramway.

The standard gauge points (with one on order) and the crossing indicates, how the connection down to the explosives factory at the far left will be made. The crossing and the right-hand points will also connect to the tracks at the far right.

The six narrow gauge points and the two cardboard cut-outs show the general flow of the little railway serving the goldmine at the front left, the explosives factory and the the sawmill in the middle. The points are a bit ‘big’ for such a small enterprise, but I paid just $51 for six new electro-frog points from Ebay. The old Heljan factory will have two doors cut into the front and serve as a repair shop / shed for the railway.