Evolution

I’m wondering what my own evolution as a modelmaker is, after all, I’ve managed one tiny box file layout on three four years, which makes me wonder if I’m ever going to make a ‘real layout. Mostly I just like to create things and tell stories, and model railways seemed to be the natural way to go as I like trains, but these days it’s getting crowded out by other important stuff, and making models seems to be increasingly self-indulgent as I’m the only person -at least the only person here- who appreciates the models, whereas things like natural building and storytelling -which I started to do after getting experience in model making- have a practical use and can be things for other people to enjoy.

It’s ironic that the confidence I gained in model making means that now I’ve got very little time to do it, but life can be funny like that.

I’m also job hunting which takes time and energy, and I’ll working on a fairly big natural building and gardening project this year (could that be considered 1:1 model making?). Before someone suggests a garden railway, the land is one massive slope so unless I want to make a scale model of the Rhosydd incline it’s dead loss.

I guess this is all to say that blog posts are likely to be irregular here from now on. It’s not closing down: I enjoy making models too much for that. I’ll keep working on the Körschtalbahn as and when I can, and keep posting about the various misadventures of my incompetent model making and travelling about in Germany, but for a while at least, until I’ve got work and other things sorted out, it’ll be a bit quiet, like a preserved railway out of season, with the occasional post and essential maintenance.

The other blog will be updated regularly and can be found here.

Gotcha…

I’ve mentioned before that my construction methods are a bit unusual. It’s the same with my photography. From what I can gather a proper railway photographer takes pictures of trains like this:

• Organise trip to half a dozen locations.
• Procure working timetables for each location for three years either side of proposed date.
• Get hold of inside information as to which locomotives will be used for the trip, average speed, number of wagons in train, et c.
• Get all tickets
• Plan locations and angles, taking into account position of the sun, number of days to the solstice, atmospheric pressure and moon phases.
• Arrive at least 24 hours before the event.
• Set up an hour in advance.
• Take 37 images which would not look out of place at a fine art exhibition.

As you’ll probably expect, it’s a bit different here. Any and all observations about the minutiae of the railway systems I’m traveling on are simply opportunistic picture grabs taken as and when we aren’t running for trains. The usual process is as follows:

• While travelling on random train, spot something interesting coming along. Fast.
• Get camera out.
• Attract attention of Nearest Son who wants to see what is happening.
• Nearest Son grabs hold of daddy, causing me to wobble.
• Grab hold of Nearest Son and lift him with left arm, resulting in violent protest from left shoulder.
• Show Nearest son what I’ve seen.
• Point camera at what I’ve seen, which is a lot closer now.
• Camera focuses somehow despite being held in one hand and aiming through a window.
• And…

Which is why this picture of a Japan Railfreight EF200 and EF66 B-B-B unit in the outskirts of Nagoya is perhaps a bit below the standards of the Royal Photographic Society.

Still, a few minutes with the Gimp and I got a halfway decent shot:

The EF210‘s are Japan Railfreights new B-B-B design and cam bomb along the track at a respectable 110km/h which compares well with the 140km/h of the UK’s class 92, which are the UK’s newest electric freight locomotives. The EF210′s are now replacing the venerable EF66 locomotives like the one parked next to it so I’m glad I got at least one picture of them while still in service.

It only took a week for my left shoulder to get back to normal.

Christmas 2011

Happy Christmas, and many thanks for reading and commenting this year.

That is all.

Körschtalbahn History 1979-1985

The last instalment of the Körschtalbahn’s ‘history’ was so long ago I had to back and read it. I left the line in a bit of a mess, with Deutsche Bahn trying to shut it down and increasing road transport competition.

This is of course a rather typical scenario: so many books on Narrow Gauge history describe it as ‘inevitable’ that this or that railway closed because of “Economics”. Economics has become a dogma, an excuse for anything that corporations and governments want to push through against the will of normal people, but just occasionally, if there’s enough people, and they’re properly organised, they can change things.

Let’s assume this happened. The local government was planning a major road building project, which would cut through the heart of several villages in the Körschtal,Of course, this would render the railway ‘obsolete’. A similar scheme had just finished off the Altensteig line, but whereas the road that replaced that line had crossed the Nagold valley on a graceful viaduct, this plan would mean destroying the historic centre of Wildberg.

Coming so soon after the oil crisis, and at a time when tourism was really beginning to kick off in the Black Forest, the citizens of Wildberg and the Körsch valley revolted and elected a new council opposed to the scheme. Much muttering and negotiating later, the Körschtalbahn, track stock and buildings and the power plants on the river were bought from Deutsche Bahn who valued it at one German Mark: the Tax Department demanded twenty Pfennigs extra.

It was quickly realised that the summer tourist season would contribute the most revenue but also that tourists would be the least inclined to make allowances for the state of the track and overhead wiring. Over the winter of 1979-1980 therefore, passenger trains were replaced by buses and the track was entirely replaced. There was some discussion about making the line diesel operated throughout but this was rejected: oil prices hadn’t settled down yet, and there were plenty of metre gauge trams on the market which would provide a cheap, rapid passenger service. For greater capacity and through trains the newly formed “Körschtalbahn Limited” (KÖB) refurbished their fleet of ageing bogie passenger coaches: these and what freight was still running were handled by a motley collection of diesel locomotives until such a time as the railway could afford more powerful electric rail cars in the mid 1980′s.

By 1985 the line was running several passenger trains a day plus tourist trains in the summer and winter peak seasons: the trams had proved a success, and several new stops had been integrated into the system. The maintenance sheds ad Dachsburg were extended and upgraded to handle major repairs, and a new railcar shed was built in Spitzenwald which could handle day-to-day maintenance on diesel locomotives. I’ll explain why that isn’t pie-in-the-sky in another post.

School traffic provided a regular steady income outside of the holiday season and there was a small but growing number of commuters who had moved out to the Körsch valley and worked in Wildberg, Nagold or even Pforzheim, but the railway was still handling but a tiny percentage of the freight traffic which was booming in the Körsch valley: timber, the traditional staple of the railway was moving to road as fast as the swamills were growing, and as new industries came to the valley they were often adding more and larger trucks to the already congested roads, damaging the very fabric of the villages and driving away tourists.

It was time for the Körschtalbahn to re-enter the freight transport market.

Loose Ends

It’s that time of year again: Christmas is coming, etc. and while I can’t comment on the obesity of the local goose population, I can be sure that there’s going to be little happening on the workbench for a while, unless you count wrapping presents etc. So for the next few weeks I’m going to sort out things I started writing about on the blog, but then forgot about, like the story of the Körschtalbahn, which I seem to have stopped writing back in 2009 with Deutsche Bahn trying to close it down, or the continuing archaeology of the real metre gauge electrified railway that used to run near here, before the local down did, alas, manage to get rid of it.

I’ve got a few remaining posts about Japan, and people seem to like the odd fictional piece I’ll see what I can dig up. I may slip in a couple of posts that I’ve published before but I promise they’ll all be over a year old so you’ll probably not notice.

Long term I don’t know what may happen. Future model making rather depends on getting a job that pays rather better than this one. I’ve a couple of open possibilities, but at the time of writing the most promising one will tell me what is happening after Christmas. The reason they gave was “At the moment we’ve got so much work we can’t even think” I’m taking that as a good sign.

Blue Thunder

It’s been a busy week. unfortunately I didn’t spend it building anything for the Körschtalbahn, but as readers of the other blog already know, I’m trying to get a job and collecting vital ingredients for the garden. After five years here I’d forgotten how stressful job hunting is, so I turned to YouTube for a bit of light relief.

Japan Railways decided they needed a new heavy haul electric loco, so they ordered a fleet of articulated B-B-B-B units which they classified as the EH200, and also named the  ‘Blue Thunder’. I’m not sure why. We saw several EH200′s while travelling between Nagoya and Nagano in summer, unfortunately they were all flashing past the window of our train so I have to make do with someone else’s videos. It’s probably not for extreme steam fans:

The trains seem to be a bit short in this video: the longest train is 15 tankers. I’m guessing the wheel arrangement is more to do with keeping the axle weight down than maximum power in each unit.
I could make a diesel version of this for Spitzenwald, but I’d have to forget about having trains or a station and just turn the whole model into a locomotive shed, which would be a bit boring.

Small Scale Detective

Life continues to intervene, so this week I went through some unused drafts in the hope of having something to post. This one dates from the time I was changing scale from 1:43 to 1:55…

Chicago, a seedy office on the wrong side of town…

It was Tuesday when she came back into the office. The smell of perfume came through the door before her elegantly gloved hand turned the handle. As usual she didn’t bother to knock first.
“You’ve had two days” She said, striding over to the window “I hope you’ve something to show for it”
“Sure” I said, but you ain’t gonna like it. “Why don’t you take a seat, you’re paying the rent after all”
She turned and looked at me like I was something she’d caught on her boot. I got the file out.
“You’re outa your league, sweetheart” I flipped the file open. Drawings and measurements spilled out onto the desk.
She glared “How dare you” she growled.
“I said you wouldn’t like it. Look at this lot” I sat and took out one of her drawings. “You’re working in 1:55 scale, right? What made you think you could build a railcar that size?”
“It’s a Swiss prototype, you idiot” She snapped, taking out a cigarette. “They’ve a bigger loading gauge”
“Not that big sweetheart. Doors 35 millimetres high? Loading gauge almost fifty millimetres wide? You movin’ in on the O scale boys or something?
She made a drag on her cigarette and blew smoke at me. Expensive brand. She had serious money, maybe even enough to go DCC.
“No-one would notice”
I pulled another drawing out.
“I did some checkin’ up: a standard ISO container is eight feet wide, at 1:55 scale that’s forty-four millimetres, tops. Did you think you’d be able to make a 50mm wide loco and no-one would notice?”
She’s barely taken a second drag on her cigarette before she smashed it into the desk.
“And to think I was goin’ to ask you about track construction” She stood up.
“I said you wouldn’t like it”
“What can I do now?” She asked suddenly. “I can’t go back to 1:43 scale, the gauge looks all wrong.” She turned and looked at me. Crocodile tears. RHB, not SBB.
“Aw, come on. I ain’t gonna waste time on this. Start over. Do some more research, get some kits.”
“I can’t use a soldering iron”
“Girl with your dough? You could get any number of guys to make ‘em for you. If you don’t wanna do that, go for HO scale, or get something from LGB.”
That did it. She threw some dough on the desk. Crisp notes.
“I’m outa here. That should cover your expenses.” She opened the door with a flourish and turned. “You know what you are? a small scale detective, that’s all. I’ll bet you build in 09.”
She slammed the door. I listened to her footsteps down the corridor. Then I gathered the papers into the file, and went out to find lunch.

Non-combatants

This Sunday is ‘Volkstrauertag’, the German equivalent of Remembrance Sunday or Veterans Day. For obvious reasons it is a bit different here. In particular Germany makes a conscious effort to remember all victims of war, including civilians.

My paternal Grandfather was never in the millitary. This was not because he had any strongly held anti-war convictions, but because he worked on the railways and they needed him to do his job there during World War Two. During world war two, if you were in the south or east of the UK, you were on the front line, especially if you worked on the railways, and three months before the war began my Granddad was made a shunter guard, a “Special Man” -which we suspect meant he was paid as a shunter but worked as a guard- based in one of the biggest freight yards in the Midlands, the industrial heartland of the UK. Freight yards are dangerous places at the best of times, with wagons moving in u predictabledirections, with and without locomotives pushing them. The shunter had to run alongside moving wagons and put the brakes on, then couple wagons together with a wooden pole. During the war there was a strict blackout at night, and all movements were carried out in near pitch darkness, so he would be dodging rolling wagons and trying not to fall over track, run into posts, or trip on point levers, surrounded by several trains full of things like high explosives, weapons, food, oil and petrol, with steam locomotives showing a lovely white plume of steam. And then there would be an air raid.

Beyond the freight yards were factories, each one as likely to be bombed as the trains, and air raid shelters were of limited use right next to a train full of high explosives. In other words, my Granddad spent his working days and nights in the middle of a vast target area, and often the best he could do was put a helmet on and keep working and hope that his yard wasn’t the designated target that night, or that an equally terrified bomb aimer wouldn’t decide to dump his not-very-accurate bombs just as he was overhead so he can try to get home alive.

People regularly worked twelve hour shifts and my Granddad fell asleep riding his bicycle home several times. For guards the shift would end wherever they were at the time, so if he was on a train it could be stopped because of a raid up the line, sent back a bit, and then shoved in a siding until another train passed. He could be dropped off miles from home.

Always assuming, of course, that his home hadn’t been destroyed.

This would happen every night. For weeks. No leave, no ‘rest and recovery’ time, just a 12 hour break and the knowledge that next shift he’d have to do it all again.

Granddad wouldn’t talk about the war. Not many of his generation did: they just got on with what needed to be done, and and if they survived they went back and did it again the next day, so many selfless acts by non-combatants were forgotten. I do remember one conversation we had when I was a child which made me think there was more than he would tell. There was an old war film on television and he suddenly turned to me and said: “Just remember, when we see an explosion there, no-one is killed. In the real world it was different.”

He wouldn’t say any more.

I don’t believe this.

I was all ready to go: I had the LED’s and chassis, I’d discovered a that I didn’t have any solder flux, but after much questioning online I”d figured out the German for this, and I knew where to get some, and, and even what I can use as a substitute until I do. As an extra bonus I then discovered that I did have a tin of solder flux  lurking in a drawer in the workbench and it wasn’t even empty. Nothing could stop me now…

Except that the solder was missing.

Checked workshop, model making boxes, drawers, even my bike bags which is where most missing small items end up.

Nothing.

So I worked on a container wagon and a rebuild of the Very Low Relief Engine shed. At least that way I’ve made something this week.

Photos to follow as soon as they look interesting.

Edit: living in a different country from most of my readers has frequent small hazards, one of which is that dates of national importance differ. I originally titled this post ‘soldering on’ but then was reminded that in the UK the 11th of November is the day of remembrance, hence the change of title. Sorry if I offended anyone in the two hours that went by before I noticed this...

Determination… sort of.

Lack of progress on the Körschtalbahn is getting very frustrating so I was determined to make some progress on something. Baseboards seemed a good place to start: the polystyrene/cardboard sandwich hadn’t worked out, but that wasn’t going to stop me now. All it would take was a visit to the village carpenter* and I could move forward, definitely this time, I was determined…

Then I realised I couldn’t do much this week because we were visiting some good friends in Neuenburg in the Black Forest. Never mind, I’d do get the wood next week. Definitely. I wasn’t going to let that stop me.

As a bonus I had time to get some pictures. Neuenburg is on a branch of the Karlsruhe S-Bahn system which is based on the idea of running trams on normal railway. This means the trams are found far beyond where you’d normally expect a tram to go, which is why you get interesting pictures like this of a city tram in a very rural station. There are advantages for the local populace which go beyond interesting photo opportunities and I’ll go on about the system another time when I’ve not done enough  model making,

Neuenburg is remarkably like I imagine Spitzenwald to be, with a large rock face next to the station, and new platforms alongside a rather shabby station building. As the fictional Spitzenwald is a terminus it could well have had a building very much like this as well, but as it was a fairly impoverished narrow gauge line serving a small village I think a smaller one is more likely, besides I could never fit this one on my tiny baseboard. (Ignore the poor quality picture: our point-and-shoot camera doesn’t seem to like shadows)

I confused our friends by taking pictures of the rock face and goods shed as well. The back of Spitzenwald should basically be a rock face and I like the idea of putting netting over some bits to stop lumps falling on the track.

So I came home with lots of pictures, lots of ideas and determined to go straight to the carpenter and beg, borrow, buy, or scrounge some plywood…

Whereupon I discovered the carpenter has to go to Frankfurt for three weeks.

Well I’ve still got the LED’s to solder onto the railcar, and then in a couple of weeks, I’ll get the plywood. Definitely: I’m determined…

*who is also a model railway fan, so I may be able to scrounge something if I say it’s for a baseboard.