The movement of livestock by rail was common practice in my modelling period of the late 1960s to early 1970s and stockyards were important transshipment infrastructure at many rural stations. Consequently, the stockyard is a necessary scenic element to be added to the Kingston Plains module. Combined with the wheat silo, it provides the primary justification for freight traffic on the branch line. As with everything on the Kingston Plains module, space is tight so I had to adopt a fairly compact arrangement while hopefully still capturing the key elements of a yard, a place to load and unload livestock from vehicles, a smaller holding area that leads into the races and finally the races themselves. A visual impression of a larger paddock for overflow and longer term holding of stock has been incorporated into the backdrop.
The 'air photo' above shows the general layout of the stockyard. The stock races and fencing came from a Model Train Buildings Sheep Yard kit. This is a laser cut timber product but there are a number of alternatives around, one of which is reviewed in the April 2019 edition of AMRM. The kit that I used provides a fairly basic representation of the stock races but does include a reasonable amount of fencing. The vehicle stock race is a white metal kit which I acquired many years ago. The cattle grid, while not strictly part of the stock yard, is required to stop any stock straying into the silo area. It was scratch built using old code 75 track and some scrap styrene.
The races and fencing were painted and weathered with pastels and isocol alcohol before installation. One of the challenges of installation was the undulations in the ground necessitating short lengths of fence butted against each other at different heights. Getting the distance between the wagon and the race also took a bit of fiddling but was finally fixed into position only to find the K truck carrying the accompanying water tank fowls the race slightly. Aw well, it adds to the shunting challenge.A few things have yet to be added, a couple of shade trees, a water trough and, of course, a sheep dog!
