New Zealand Model Railways in HO scale

Scene from Lewis Holden's HOn3.5 / NZ87 layout Like most readers, I got started in this hobby with an OO scale Hornby train set for Christmas. My uncle, a former driver for Tranz Metro and long-time model train enthusiast and my grandfather built a loop of Hornby set track, and I was, no pun intended, hooked. Fast forward to homeownership and all its many joys, I finally had my own space in a single-car garage that was too small to fit a single car in. I started building a 1:64 scale layout but found that there wasn't enough space to run the sorts of modern-era trains I wanted. I made the decision to focus on the era I knew best, the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, when I grew up in Pukerua Bay north of Porirua. That means longer trains of bogie wagons and limited four-wheel wagons. Following a house move, I switched to NZ120 and built a number of wagons, a DSG class locomotive and a DC class locomotive, both acquired via Shapeways. At the time I became interested in the possibili