The fantastic weather has continued in our region and the blue skies seem to make living here even more enjoyable. Our neighbour, who has a grass airstrip on his property, has been flying his superb biplane ultralight a lot and as his final approach goes basically straight over our cottage we enjoy seeing him pass quite low over us. He is obviously having a lot of fun! Unfortunately no pictures, as I am notoriously bad at taking photos of aircraft in flight!
Today I joined a good friend in a fun car run around our district in his Citroën Light 15. It is a magnificent car and we drove somewhere in the region of 100ks effortlessly over quiet back roads. Old car owners are seemingly always looking for 'parts' and old wrecks in sheds etc, and today, lo and behold, we found an amazing stash of old cars, mostly American and a few British, but unfortunately no French.
I was particularly impressed with this 'ute'. I still harbor a dream to own one of these early 40s Chevs, but perhaps to upgrade the mechanical bits to make it more useable. Typically one of these would have a wooden or metal tray back, but this 42 model is a genuine 'ute', or coupe utility as they were formally named, which I'm sure is quite rare. Ford Australia invented the 'ute' in 1934, whereby the open rear portion sides were a continuation of the cab, rather than an added 'box'. Other Australian manufacturers followed suit, and obviously the idea caught on over in the US too, but it was we Aussies who invented the concept. This one was definitely not for sale, however!
There was also a graveyard of other 'projects', the likes of which are becoming harder to find. I'm sure eventually all this will become available, perhaps by auction, though it seems unlikely that some of the cars will be saved as they were pretty far gone.
Anyway, it was great fun looking around! In my earlier years I was, or at least I thought I was, very keen on car restoration, but I soon discovered that I neither had the time or the skills to do it properly. In those days I would have jumped at the chance to rescue and rebuild any of these cars, but not now. I certainly admire people who can take on these 'heroic' restorations and return them to life though! For the time being I'll be sticking to collecting model cars as a side to the trains. I have gathered together all my French model cars of 1:43 scale from assorted storage boxes and have displayed them in the entry area of my Trainbarn. It was really fun getting them all together in one place, but it was even more fun finding them!
Good weather, good times and good friends!
Autumn is a magnificent time of year in our area, and today was superb! There are a lot of events happening this weekend and also next weekend, being Easter. A new museum is opening just south of us and although my expectations were pretty low as to what it would be like I decided to go for a drive and have a look. If all else failed the drive along the New England Highway would be enjoyable, and it was!
The first stop was Wallangarra Station, where rather surprisingly I found our local steam train ready to depart.
Wallangarra is interesting in that it is a break-of gauge station, and the border of the states of New South Wales and Queensland actually runs through the platform. In days past the Queensland 3' 6" gauge trains would pull into one side of the platform and the New South Wales 4' 8 1/2" gauge trains would pull in on the other side. The Queensland line is still open and well maintained, though these days only used by heritage trains, but the New South Wales line is very much closed, though still in place. There is a very active Railway Museum group in Tenterfield, but obviously it would be an enormous and expensive task to re-open the line north to the border, but it would be a wonderful trip if they did!
A major hurdle to re-opening the line is this superb old bridge. Sadly, it looks like it's going to fall down very soon, but line re-opening or not it should be preserved, though that's pretty unlikely too.
There was quite a gathering of cars at the new Museum, though mostly a lot newer than I'm interested in. You rarely see true Vintage or Veteran cars out here in the country these days, though I'm assuming they still get together in the bigger cities. Anyway there were a couple of really nicely restored classics amongst the gathering, and here is a beautiful Ford Zephyr from about 1955.
Having just returned home now after a really fun barbecue with friends at our local National Park, I'd have to say that it was a pretty good day all round!!
