The house buyer’s name is Daniel Xu, and I heard about his story reading
, which is a great daily news briefing you can subscribe to for free on Substack. It’s perfect for a quick morning browse. Sam Sheddon gets up at 5am each morning and compiles a summary of things making news in Melbourne, and its handy for those of us preferring music or podcasts in the morning, or sick of social media algorithms and the endless doomscrolling. We recommend each other on Substack, and it really helps bringing in subscribers. Get behind Sam, Melbournians!
Anyway, back to Daniel Xu.
It’s a glorious story, so much better than finding a termite nest under your house, and the serendipity that tops it off is that Daniel’s day job is as an engineer helping to build railway stations in the new Metro tunnel. He’s actually capable! Daniel has skills! Now he has a new restoration project, and the good news for him is that he’s not under strict instructions to have it finished by the state election. 😀
I watched Daniel’s story, and thought back to my own experience touring an incredible model train set. It was back in 2000, and I was producing and presenting on an ABC TV show called ‘On the Move’. It was a magazine type thing with a focus on cars and motoring, and I was on the show to make quirky human interest bits about things that weren’t cars, but did move. We only lasted one season. In retrospect, I was always unlikley to be the smash hit star of an Australian Top Gear, if only for the fact that I don’t like cars.
The train set I did a story on was called Alpenrail, located in Claremont Tasmania. It was made by an engineer named Rudi Jenni and his artist father, and I spent a day with him on the miniature hills of the Jungfrau, attempting not to step on small plastic cows. (see video above) It was freaking incredible, the best back shed tourist attraction to have existed in Australian history.
Alpenrail closed about fifteen years ago (I think) and Rudi keeps it’s memory alive with a facebook page.
Here is my Alpenrail story on YouTube.
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