Time to move on.
My wife of almost 50 years Helen and I have decided to sell what has been our family home for the past 36 years and move into a yet to be built townhouse. So what does that mean for my beloved SFRSD. Well as is the case with many large model railway layouts it was going to be scrapped. I sent out one of my usual SFRSD bulletins to all of my regular operators and friends both interstate and overseas to let them know what we were about to do. Many of my close friends have helped build and work on various portions of the RR over several years so some for very good reasons have ownership in the move.
During our normal Friday get together I told the Friday group what Helen and I were planning to do. A lot of "what is going to happen to the layout", "you cannot move we will not have a layout to run on at your new home". It was during this discussion that one of the group mentioned that I should see if some of my mates would be interested in purchasing the layout and several names were suggested. I did not think too much more about that until!
I received many nice comments from all over about the move and several expressed and interest in purchasing items off the RR and some the layout itself.
After the dust had settled down John a close friend and one of our Friday group who lives close by started to ask more questions than the other guys interested about purchasing. What are the dimensions of walls, how high are my fascia and backdrops and as this started to intensify I began to realize that John was getting very serious about a potential purchase of the SFRSD.
How much is this and how much is that as emails were flying back and forward between us over several days until finally I had to ask "Are you serious about purchasing the SFRSD" . "Yep sure am" came back.
Well that was a great surprise and one that will see the SFRSD be moved only 7 minutes away from our home and still be available for all the guys to continue to operate. How Cool is that!
John has purchased everything, layout, Locos, rolling stock along with all of the buildings, signalling and the CTC computer screens and software.
This is a fantastic result and one that I did not see coming.
So whilst it will be sad to see my beloved SFRSD go it will be reinstalled into a new location and I will get to assist in both the dismantling and installation plus operate in a new environment. Cannot get much better than that.
Stick around as we start the move.
Thanks for stopping by.
Rod.
