How Margot and Des made their new house a home
Published on 19 August 2024
It would have come as no great surprise to anyone when, back in his teenage years, Des decided to pursue a career in the train industry.
After all, both his grandfather and his father had worked on the railways across Victoria, with Des spending much of his childhood in the country town of Merrigum where his father was station master.
“When I’d go and play, I’d play in the railway yard, so I got used to the movement of trains,” recalls Des.
On many occasions, young Des would get invited to climb aboard one of the goods trains for the day, and he’d be off on an adventure for a few hours before transferring to a passenger train and heading back home again.
“Trains are in his blood,” beams Margot, Des’s wife of 62 years.
Des himself spent years working in administration for the Victorian Railways Rolling Stock Branch, and by the time he retired at 57 years of age, he, his father and grandfather had given 134 accumulative years of service to growing and operating the state’s extensive rail network.
As a third-generation railway man, it wasn’t easy for Des to walk away from the world of trains. So, following his retirement, he found a way to maintain this passion: model railways.
Over the course of two years, Des built an extraordinary model of the town of Merrigum, measuring two by three metres. He then dedicated about three months to wiring the train tracks to allow his locomotives to run, and countless days, weeks and months afterwards painstakingly maintaining and expanding the model.
“I’m always tinkering with the model and adding bits on and that sort of thing. It keeps me entertained,” says Des with a smile.
“Then I’ll look in my train register book and see it’s been three years since I’ve oiled everything, so I’ll go in and oil all the tracks again.”
So passionate is Des about his model trains, that when he and Margot decided that it was time to move out of their family home of 46 years and into a retirement village, they had some very specific requirements.
According to Margot, any unit they moved into needed to have a garden and three bedrooms: one for them to share, one for her to use as an office, and one large enough to house Des’s model trains.
“When I walked to the front door of this unit, one of my favourite trees [from our family home] – the lipstick pink camellia – was right by the front door. I knew then it was the perfect unit.”
That was 15 years ago. Since then, Margot and Des have worked hard to make their new house a home, which is evident everywhere you look.
Photos of Margot and Des’s large family – they have four children, 12 grandchildren and three great grandchildren – line the walls of the living room, as do paintings, antique clocks and artworks of heartwarming personal significance.
Their courtyard garden is also full of carefully cultivated flowers and plants, from which Margot’s support workers at AccessCare have been delighted to be gifted cuttings.
And then there’s the kitchen, the heart of every home, where Margot and Des are always willing to share stories from their long life together over a cuppa at their dining table.
“I couldn’t travel when I was younger as we had a lot of responsibilities; we got married young and then started having babies straight away,” says Margot. “I had to wait until I was in my early 40s, and then I used to jokingly say, ‘Well, now I’ll have my teenage years’.”
Over those years, Margot tried parasailing, whitewater rafting and numerous other adrenaline-fuelled activities, and she took helicopter flights over the Grand Canyon, Milford Sound, Alaskan glaciers and Hawaiian volcanoes.
And of course, there have been plenty of train journeys. Together, Margot and Des travelled through Alaska on the Denali Explorer up to Fairbanks, and on the Rocky Mountaineer through the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Closer to home, they journeyed through the Australian outback on the Ghan up to Alice Springs.
Having met some 65 years ago, their stories are innumerable; many happy, some sad, all of them important. Things didn’t always go to plan, and recently their health has started to decline, but as Margot notes, “we’re not going to give in to the negative.”
And thankfully for other train enthusiasts who might emerge in their family, Des has managed to get many of his own recollections from his childhood and career down on paper in his memoir, titled ‘Town and Country Life’.
AccessCare is humbled to be able to support Margot and Des to continue living with their garden, railway models and family memorabilia for as long as possible.
Inset photos (top of page to bottom):
- Des with his Merrigum model train set.
- An aerial view of Des's model train set.
- Merrigum's Railway Hotel in Des's model.