Model Railway Trackside Tips

My new book Model Railway Trackside Tips becomes my 18th release!

Releasing my 18th book has been somewhat of a surprise. If I'm honest and cast my mind back to 2012 when my 3rd novel Last Wish of Summer was released in the United States, I would have been happy just to have seen my fourth novel make it to a release date! Yet here I am a decade later, officially announcing the release of my second model railway how-to book which joins the stable alongside my other 12 railway books.

A book on all you need to know about detailing model train track!

Writing under the label of my own Philden Model Railway Presents banner, there's nothing more daunting than self-publishing something that hasn't been attempted in this country before, which is writing a model railway instructional book for the Australian market. There have been plenty of successful model train publications over the decades from large publishers in the United States and the United Kingdom, but with the Australian model railway market being a small one, no-one to the best of my knowledge has ever published a book that speaks to the ordinary Aussie modeller. Finally, there is a book where I don't have to stop and convert 5/32" inch into millimetres when reading how to build a model railway project, and it has my name on the cover!

After the success of my first such book, Build a Bookshelf Layout (released late 2021), I felt I had an anchor book to fashion a series of task-orientated books around. Model Railway Trackside Tips is, as the title suggests, all about how to lay model railway track that looks great and runs reliably. If you'd like the model railway version of my book launch announcement in all its' technical glory, you can find it here on my popular Philden Model Railway blog. For this post, I'd like to share just a little of what the book means to me from a writer's point-of-view.

Writing is hard. Well... easy in theory, difficult in its' execution and marketing.

My model train hobby took a back seat between 2006-2013 while I concentrated on establishing myself as a novelist and writing my first four novels. It had to, simply because as a husband and father of two teenagers, there's only so many hours in a week. Later when we moved out of our family home and into a smaller appartment, I sold off my collection and told myself I could always build another display layout once I had established myself as a full-time writer.

Despite trying hard to promote my books and continue to work on the next novel, the moment never came. However, during those years we did have some of the best holidays as a family while watching our children grow and finish school. When I was finally finished with the idea of being a novelist, I took a few days break to clear my head, and set off on my own to ride The Sunlander train from Brisbane to Cairns and back in the months before it was retired. I came back, had an idea to write a window seat guide about it, and produced my first eBook on Smashwords which went on to be nominated for the 2015 Global eBook Awards. I wrote four such guide books in the years that followed, all while starting a small cleaning business on the Sunshine Coast alongside my wife Denise simply by using my spare time wisely. I went on to produce a total of 12 railway books and this marks my 13th railway-related book.

More importantly, as one child had already spread her wings and left home, by 2015 I had once more afforded myself the time and money required to build a small model railway layout in our apartment. The small bookshelf layout called Philden (Phill and Denise combined into the one name, the same as we would use for our local cleaning business), spawned its own blog, Philden Model Railway, appeared at 8 different model railway exhibitions and on the cover of a model railway magazine, before becoming the subject for Build a Bookshelf Layout. The idea was simply to preserve all the articles I had posted on my blog, after I discovered one night that a hacker had taken over my blog and was redirecting all of my links to questionable Eastern European websites. So as you can see, great ideas often come from the ashes of trying.

So party hats on everyone. I know this isn't a book release that will rival James Patterson for sales. But as I officially release this, the book is already a sucess due to all the advance sales and hobby shops across Australia who are stocking it in large numbers. Success is really what you want it to be. For me, its being able to look back on the amazing things my wife and I have got to enjoy while raising our kids, the holidays we all had together, the places we visited and the dots on maps inbetween that I detoured to as a Dad, simply to photograph a train or an abandoned railway station. That's the work I am most proud of.

I now have some prized model trains that are the envy of other modellers in the hobby, a new bigger shelf layout that is almost complete and takes pride of place in our new apartment, and a new life alongside my wife of 30 years Denise as empty-nesters back in Brisbane. Somehow in some crazy messed-up way, between my airbrushing skills detailing miniature railway models, and writing model railway how-to books, I've actually been working as a full-time writer/modeller for the past few months without realising it. It's probably a bigger accomplishment than the book itself!

So please, take a moment to preview the book through the links in the right hand column of this blog, and even if model trains aren't your thing, I'll have a special announcement to follow next month. Yes, another new book is ready to be released shortly, and one that is not railway related!

Cheers for now!

Phill O