Les Hiddins Layout

This is a professionally built layout that Les Hiddins had commissioned, to be built in Germany and then had shipped to Kuranda where he lived. When Les decided to move to other pastures he made the decision to start a new layout from scratch. He had offered this layout to a number of other model railway clubs, who had in turn declined acceptance, before very generously offering it to CMRC. It was gratefully accepted but at that time the club did not have facilities to even store the layout. The club was offered access to a shop premises in Mulgrave Road as a storage location for its assets, for an unknown period of time. This usage was gradually extended to allow the reassembly of the club layouts and to start construction of a members layout, and included the reassembly of this layout to a full operational standard. Again the club was forded to relocate, this time to Raintrees Shopping Centre, where the layout was once again recommissioned. Reliability problems began to manifest themselves, partly as a result of the moves and partly because the layout was created for a European climate rather than the humid tropics. It is planned that future moves will allow updating of critical features in this layout and a possible extension to the panorama. It will create a more user friendly control system and facilitate more members being able to demonstrate the layout to visitors.