Yes, I've shot at this place before; the PAD of 19 April last year. Though that time I was playing around with shutter speeds, this time I was playing around with ways of overcoming the issues involved with shooting through shop windows. I used the "pancake" prime lens wide open to maximise sharpness and minimise exposure time.

But you're here for the image, not my learning curve.

The display window of Hobbyco contains a huge model railway diorama. Model railways are singularly useful Canon (sic) fodder for cameras, having a combination of macro options, motion blur, depth of field... you name it; whatever you want to practice, a model railway can accommodate. Less so when it's in a shop window, but it still provides opportunities.

Four carriages in the foreground of the diorama are static. I'm not sure whether it's because they're static models only, whether they're incompatible with the track, or whether at $625 per carriage (put your eyes back in) they're just too expensive to risk crashing. (There are four of them on display, so there's $2,500 worth of model rail carriages just sitting there.) They're models of the single deck passenger carriages which were constructed between 1926 and 1960 (back in the days when we still had the industrial wherewithal to create rolling stock from scratch instead of importing it in kit form from China), and which served as the backbone of Sydney's rolling stock through until their retirement in the early 1990's. Because of the NSW Railways' then red livery, they became known as "red rattlers". (If you ever rode on one, and I did, you'll know why.)

In the early 1970's the NSW Government Railways and their red livery, the NSW Government Buses with their green and cream livery and the NSW Ferries (same as the buses) merged to become the Public Transport Commission of NSW, adopting a blue and white livery for all vehicles and vessels. That lasted a handful of years before they were broken up again, with only the buses retaining the blue and white colours. In this case we see one of the red rattlers in the 1970's blue colour scheme.

It's still $625, though.

One of the non-static trains heads past in the background.

(A side note from the year 2023; this is one of the VERY few photos in my PBase galleries that seems to be indexed on Google. As a result it's a rare one which gets any significant number of visits. I would indeed be curious to know what you (theoretical future viewer) were looking for when you came here. Comments from non-PBase members are hidden until vetted, but I still do read them and publish them if they aren't spam.)

Last Year