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Melbourne man discovers extensive model train network underneath house
- wrs 1y agoThis is fantastic. But wow, the home inspector was really phoning it in that day!
- justusthane 1y agoOur inspector missed obvious asbestos in the basement — I would have preferred the model trains!
- classichasclass 1y agoOur home inspector missed the front door failing to latch!
- xattt 1y agoThe finger curls. You get model trains carrying carloads of asbestos.
- qingcharles 1y agoGood news, everyone! It'll be all legal again soon: https://www.ishn.com/articles/114790-trump-administration-to-reconsider-asbestos-ban https://www.ishn.com/articles/114790-trump-administration-to...
- King-Aaron 1y agoUnbelievable lol.
- nandomrumber 1y agoThat’s not what the article you linked says.
- Untit1ed 1y agoIt's an omission so huge you could drive a train through it.
- phire 1y agoInspector wound't have had any reason to mention it. They care about structural issues. The foundation is still clearly visible, they could do their job despite the railway. And they wouldn't have known that others didn't know it was there.
- Sgt_Apone 1y agoOurs did up a full report with pictures. I also walked through with the guy. Seems like something they would mention, even offhand.
- greenknight 1y agoThis is in Melbourne, where most homes are sold via auction (because of the limited supply)... lots of people are forgoing building inspections because of it. Wouldnt be surprised if he didnt do one.
- Hilift 1y agoIt could be sold as an "as-is", intended for knockdown/ demolition and replacement, or removal. That's why the 20% minimum open space requirements for new homes.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- emmelaich 1y agoHome inspectors (at least in Australia) are next to useless and expensive. The one I bought a report from never looked under the house or in the attic.
- nsomaru 1y agoWhy don’t get sued into usefulness when issues inevitably arise in properties they’ve inspected? When you pay an expert and rely on their opinion, you have recourse
- alias_neo 1y agoMy experience here in the UK, despite getting the highest "tier" of survey carried out on my (current) home when buying it, was that within the 74 page report they produced, there were at least a dozen occurrences of the surveyors recommending a "specialist". They avoid any liability by saying, "we couldn't survey under the floor", we recommend getting in a specialist. "we can't assess the roof structure", we recommend getting a specialist. By the time all was said and done, we were looking at tens of thousands of pounds in further "specialist" surveys, which nobody realistically is going to do only to decide after that you won't buy the house. I can imagine once you're looking at houses priced in the millions it might make sense, but blowing the equivalent of your deposit just isn't tenable.
- bombcar 1y agoMy home inspection report was two pages of useful information (here’s where the water shutoff is, the breaker panel is here), a page with two actual real issues (garage door opener didn’t work, kitchen foundation was settling) and then ten to twenty pages of “we don’t look at shit” legalese. They specifically disclaim being experts in damn near everything. If you want a real inspection you hire two or three building contractors to do it. I’d go with a general, a roofer, and an electrician. If I cared.
- dpb001 1y agoIn the US the quality has varied widely over the few houses I’ve purchased over the years. I’m also skeptical of their aligned interests. In the US most home purchases take place with a real estate agent involved. An inspector that adds friction to the process won’t get recommendations from agents.
- brunker2 1y agoHow? It was accessible through a door. Nobody - not the seller, agent, himself or any other prospective buyers, or the building inspector he presumably engaged to check the place over before signing contracts - thought to look behind the door? How can you buy a house without checking out the foundations/basement yourself or by a pro?
- paranoidrobot 1y agoAll the home inspectors I looked at (Victoria, where this house is, plus Tasmania) were all quite clear that they would only access areas they could find a way in. Closed up areas, wouldn't be inspected by default.
- bluGill 1y agoIn fact things like attic hatches are supposed to be sealed ane so even though seen the inspector is not allowed in the attic. (Unless there is other evedence of a problem, though they need to repair the seal in that case.
- jfengel 1y agoWhy is that? That seems odd.
- bluGill 1y agoAir seal. If the hetch can open it leaks unconditioned air and the house is less energy efficient.
- viraptor 1y agoIt's that something regional for specific access type? My Victorian houses always had the roof hatch accessible - it's just another storage area and needs to be available if you want to rewire something.
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- deadbabe 1y ago“Honey, look at this massive model train network that just happened to be in our basement!”
- holografix 1y agoHahaha exactly what I thought!
- goopypoop 1y agoNo mention of the stacks of niche magazines though
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- goopypoop 1y agoFast Railing Monthly Long Rollers Barely Legal Signals Locomania! Chuggers Driver's Wives Hot Steamy Machines Whistleblowing Enthusiast SMUTS Country Tooter Shudders & Squeals Stiff Points Quarterly The Linkage Lover This Oiled Life Footplate Fanciers Tiny Tunnels Dirty Platform Digest Wide Gauge Wonders Derailed Darlings
- 6forward 1y agoExactly! This basement could be an antique roadshow’s dream
- alnwlsn 1y agoSide note, but if you're trying to sell off this stuff, you better do it soon. Train nuts like this are a dying breed. Probably will all be mostly worthless in a couple decades, along with commemorative plates, or the "good china" your parents never use. Market is hot(ish) now though, or was a few years ago. A friends dad died and he had trains. We helped ebay all of it. Owned a toy store or something, lots of rare stuff (like window displays). We even had a guy buy one of the rare posters, return it for questionable reasons, and then start selling counterfeits. Even so, the grand total wasn't a ton of money, more within the "worth doing" category.
- qtwhat 1y agomodel train network?! a network to train your large language model?
- m463 1y agoBetter scrupulously check keywords when hiring engineers to work on this. "bringing it up to code" might also be as ambiguous as "engineer"
- viraptor 1y ago"Done, it's all up to code, your house has been migrated to the cloud".
- chrismorgan 1y agoA relative who is a manager sort in the medical software field told me yesterday about hiring hundreds of medical coders straight out of college. Apparently that doesn't mean software developers, but people who have swallowed a large catalogue mapping medical products and many-digit codes.
- m463 1y agoWith model railroads code may also mean something specifically different. For example, HO scale has for example both code 83 and code 55 track, corresponding to 83/1000" high and 55/1000" high rails. You can make choices depending on looks/proportional accuracy or possibly size for more robust operation.
- liampulles 1y agoNext they are going to calling themselves "Train Engineers"... wait
- adxl 1y agoSerendipity.
- SudoSuccubus 1y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1y agoYou can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what it's about, but especially something as benign as model trains. This kind of commenting is not what HN is for and destroys what it is for. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Kirr 1y agoPhilip K. Dick's "Small Town" is found!
- freeopinion 1y agoWere there any Klein bottles?
- SoftTalker 1y ago[flagged]
- alnwlsn 1y agoReminds me of an estate sale I went to one time. Unassuming place, one of those tiny postwar homes about the same size as the one in this article - but with at least double or triple the density of this train layout in the basement. The owner must have been a very thin person, as the narrow winding paths around the basement in places measured no more than 8 inches, and the widest parts were only about 2 foot wide. In a 900 sq. foot basement, there was probably only about 50 sq foot of floor you could actually rest your feet on. The rest was all layout and boxes of trains and train accessories of all sorts - hundreds of tiny pots of specialty paint, miniature trees, "grass powder", special linkages and wheels, and more. Probably most of it got thrown away at the end of the sale. People have hobbies, but I can't think of any circumstance in which I'd convert my basement into a deathtrap. There was less room than those hoarder houses you see on TV (but much more organized). It was genuinely concerning that they even decided to hold a sale there open to the public. Truly one of the more bizarre things I've seen. Also, the upstairs? Mostly normal - you wouldn't even know the guy liked trains.
- tenuousemphasis 1y agoSounds like he was neuro divergent and his wife made him keep his obsession in the basement.
- specproc 1y agoIs there anything particularly "neuro divergent" about having a hobby? Anyways, I doubt his wife's making him do anything. Totally normal domestic arrangement to have a space for one's thing(s), whatever it may be. Well-conducive to a happy marriage, IMHO. I'm not fortunate enough to have a whole basement to play with, but my study's piled high with my books, electronics, painting gear, art and models. I'm thankful to have a space that's mine. My SO didn't tell me to keep my shit here, I was like "dibs" on moving in.
- latentsea 1y ago> Is there anything particularly "neuro divergent" about having a hobby? Hyperfocus can make one take hobbies to fairly extreme levels.
- LeonB 1y agoThere’s never a train when you want one, but when you don’t they’re everywhere!
- astrange 1y ago> His love of rail started when he was young, through a Japanese cartoon about a crime-fighting train. I think this is Brave Express Might Gaine…?
- gonzo41 1y agoThis guy is so lucky. We all have to build our own. What a head start.
- rbanffy 1y agoI'm not really into trains, but it would be great if one day I found a 1970's computer room in my basement, complete with cold water lines, 3278 and 3279 terminals, and some tape drives... I'd be happy to discover a basement, even if the first thing I'd do would be to call the police to check if nobody went missing near my neighborhood in the past few decades.
- f4c39012 1y agohaving a basement - that's ok. Having a hidden basement - hard no on the property. And if the basement door was nailed shut or hidden - I'm leaving the house right now, seen too many movies, there's a victorian doll/music box/portrait with staring eyes waiting for the next person to go in there
- pixl97 1y agoReally if you find a hidden basement make sure it has airflow or it could easily suffocate you.
- ByteDrifter 1y agoImagine buying a house and gaining not just a home, but someone else’s whole dream world beneath your feet. That’s more than real estate. That’s a time capsule.
- em-bee 1y agoa few years ago i spent a few months in the house of an old friend of the family who spent his last days in a retirement home. the house was a treasure of interesting things to find. he was running a business out of it, and there were shelves of left over products, books and old style clothes. the most interesting was a model train set that was at least half a century old. similar the home of my own grandparents.
- b112 1y agoThe model train setup Daniel Xu found beneath the home he just purchased is impressive, but it has proven an even greater delight, given he is a train engineer and train enthusiast. Source: SBS News Uh huh... fortunate indeed. My immediate thought was, his wife discovered his hobby, and the money spent, and "No, it was here when we moved in!" Then the news shows up, and of course, he can't tell them different, or busted!
- gadders 1y agoMaybe he had to keep it a secret? "A businessman who secretly built the UK’s biggest model railway feared his girlfriend would dump him if she learnt about his ‘dull’ hobby." Train-mad Simon George, 53, spent £250,000 and a staggering eight years on his 200ft-long project. https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/07/man-spent-250000-secretly-building-britains-biggest-model-railway-15725748/ https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/07/man-spent-250000-secretly-bui...
- zeristor 1y agohttps://archive.ph/2lZ7U https://archive.ph/2lZ7U
- lupusreal 1y ago> ‘I told her the truth and she was like “ok”. ‘But she has an art degree so she appreciated the level of detail and work that went into it. We’re now engaged' Glad that worked out.
- chrisweekly 1y agoIMHO, the £250,000 is more "staggering" than the eight years he spent.
- mykehunt 1y agoThe vast majority is probably rent/property taxes. With a distant second benchwork (lumber). Half a mile of 2-rail O-scale track (3-4 mainlines in a 200 foot loop) at today's pricing is under $8 a foot retail. In bulk and pre-pandemic well under $10k total. Considering the budget his roster of engines and rolling stock seems questionable. Outside of collectable Lionel. Even the high end, magnificent museum quality KOHS brass compounded steam engine will run you ~$8,500. While he is running diesel. I can understand the appeal of mainline/realistic operations. O-scale has its limitations (normally space) but an NTRAK meet up shows more creativity. The clip of him using the knock-off Faller Grassmaster is kind of funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Mcgp6Dtq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Mcgp6Dtq8
- mykehunt 1y ago
- darkoob12 1y agoFunny some AI words are in the title and these days you expect every post on HN be related to AI. model train network
- bombcar 1y agoNow I’ve an idea for a Netflix comedy. Older gentleman with an extensive model train network and experience with Large Lionel Models gets hired as a CEO for a Silly Valley AI startup; hijinx ensue.
- gwbas1c 1y agoWhen my daughter was 2, one day I saw a sign for a model train exhibit in a strip mall. We walked into a tiny-ish hobby shop, and were directed to a staircase in a corner. At the top was a huge warehouse filled with model trains, tracks, and landscapes. She was obsessed with the largest Thomas the Tank Engine set I've ever seen, and all I wanted to do was to look at all the different landscapes.
- Theodores 1y agoThis story deserves a follow up in a few years. I would not be too hasty with modernisation of the controllers as it seems that most enthusiasts are happy with DC (analog) rather than DCC (digital). Too much determination to modernise could result in a broken train set since the project would be large. Restoration with no modernisation would still provide the fun, and be part of the owner's original vision. What he was lucky with was the state of it. My own father was into model engineering, however, he never put his tools away and never completed a project, so it just took months to tidy up his hoarded junk, to find there was absolutely nothing of value at the bottom of it. If only my dad had completed his projects and left it in the condition shown here.
- superultra 1y agoWe need a Hacker News remindme bot!
- nicman23 1y agothe people yearn for openttd
- climatenufties 1y ago[flagged]
- iosovi 1y ago[dead]
- Saul1998zx 1y ago[dead]
- Swannie 1y agoOh yeah... he "found it"... How would a buildings and pest inspection have missed it? Or, maybe he found it during inspections, knew he would never convince his wife to buy the house on the strength of the train set alone, but did managed to convince on the strength of the house... now he has to sell the lie?
- ljsprague 1y agoI love the metaphor of migrants accidentally discovering awesome remnants of the peoples they replaced.
- mykehunt 1y agoThe article says it wasn't touched since ~ the 1960's. I see an old MRC TECH II powerpack (two button as compared to three - on/off, direction only.) >> This out dates me but didn't those come to market in the 80's? Too new to be old but too old to be new. >> Also pretty sure I saw a blue Conrail GP-40-2 in the background of the Youtube clip. (Not too up on diesel. Know more about steam.) but either way Conrail wasn't formed until the late 1970's?
- mykehunt 1y agoBump for the Miniatur Wunderland - reason enough for anyone into to trains to visit Germany/Hamburg. You can easily spend two half days there. Their behind the scenes tour will give anyone with or thinking of building a layout enough ideas to keep them busy for years. Their attention to detail, not only on the front end but also the backend is incredible. My wow moment was their staging. Since the trains run for the duration of the hours they are open - they get hot so they switch between two trains for each line so the motors don't burn out. Underneath each 12-18 inch riser section in the staging area is a separate smoke detector. (~20 smoke detectors in each staging area.) https://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/ https://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@MiniaturWunderlandOfficial https://www.youtube.com/@MiniaturWunderlandOfficial