Red Trains

Every day I get on a train pulled by one of these locomotives to get me to college and back. I won’t claim they are 100% punctual but I’m usually where I need to be on time. The coaches you can’t see in the picture have two decks and the train is a push-pull set. I would have taken more pictures but it was a couple of degrees below freezing and my commitment to blogging only goes so far when it is a choice between taking pictures and being warm.

Every week a couple of trains run from a steel wholesaler near my college to a large exchange yard in Plochingen. It’s easy to forget that operations like this with short trains and a small locomotive may be normal in Germany but are pretty rare in some parts of the world. The passenger train on the platform is from a small company that runs services on branch lines locally.

There are lots of interesting railway related things happening on the daily commute to and from college, and at some point when it isn’t cloudy and cold enough to freeze my fingers to the camera, I’ll take more pictures.

Busy, busy…

I’m a bit busy right now. Enjoying myself, but a bit busy.

Most of this week has been getting to know the college and what loud and dangerous bits of machinery do which job and how they can hurt you. To date this involved a safety talk on all the interesting ways you can maim and kill yourself and anyone within a few metres of you when using a fast spinning circle saw, before cutting a thick pine plank into little chunks, which is a remarkably satisfying and very noisy experience. Then we tried to cut straight lines in said pine using a hand saw, which was somewhat less satisfying, but after an hour of sawing I could see a definite improvement, and it was a very good workout for the arm muscles.

Eight more hours of cutting wood tomorrow, followed by theory lessons later in the week, which is all very well but it’s playing hob with my blogging…

Back to school…

Long-suffering readers of this blog will have noticed that I’ve been trying to get an apprenticeship or other qualification for a couple of years now.

Well, after two years of false starts, next week I’ll start an apprenticeship as a cabinet maker/carpenter, having managed to convince a local company that I’m not too much of a liability, and filled in a small bale of forms to persuade the government that no, I’m not attempting to get money for nothing but I would like to eat. The system here is that although I’ve got an employer, I’ll spend most of the first year in college learning the basics.

Assuming I actually manage to pass the intermediate exams in a years time, I’ll be working with the company that took me on as an apprentice until 2015. Then I have to pass the final exams, including a German and Maths exam* and then make something out of wood that looks good and doesn’t collapse when the judges poke it. Unfottunately I doubt they’ll consider a model railway baseboard a worthy subject.

But that’s in three years time. This week I need to get my feet used to supporting my weight the whole day again, and then the week after I’ll start commuting to college.

I’l be going by rail.

Brace yourself for lots of pictures of red trains…

*Guess what my worst school subjects were.

Headlights for dummies.

You may have noticed that there has been next to no action on the railcar project, over a year after I was supposed to send it into the 5.5mm association competition. Okay, so I’ve been running about getting a carpentry apprenticeship, but the other reason -probably the real reason- is that I chickened out.

I’m too daunted by the working headlights, not just the circuitry but also trying to fit the LED’s into the cab area, especially as it’s a modern European design so it needs three white lights and two reds at each end.

The trouble is that I could either:

1: Fit a set of LED’s in approximately the right place so they look okay,

or

2: Solder the LED’s, if I had plenty of space.*

I’m not sure I can manage both.

I’ve managed to make the cab area so small and tight that it’s pretty hard to get at the space the LED’s should go. It would also be difficult to run the wires to the motor and attach them to the right coppery bit**, with all the other technical stuff like resistors: 1:55 scale loco bodies aren’t much bigger than ‘OO’ ones.

If I manage all of the above, I’ll then have a cab full of wires, making glazing near impossible.

I also rather foolishly got a set of ‘superbright’ LED’s and I have a feeling these won’t just make a pretty light, but will illuminate the entire layout and turn the railcar into something like a Blackpool illiminated tram in power surge.

So, time for Plan ‘B’: Dummy headlights. What is out there that looks realistic? I have wondered about just putting LED’s in place and hoping that I can wire them all up later, like the next full moon.

* …additional requirements being a lot of time, a full moon, possibly correct placing of bat entrails, a large vocabulary of the Anglo Saxon vernacular, and ideally, an electrician.

** I believe that’s the technical phrase.

We’re going on a bus hunt…

So it turns out that going from working alone and sitting most of the day, to working in a big hospital and running about carrying stuff and patients, is a bit of a shock to the system. I had expected this and came up with a cunning plan to write three posts and then let them update automatically, but that one was scuppered by all the boring admin related stuff I had to get through the week before.

It was worth it though. I’ve been working with an incredible team for two weeks and I’ll rather miss going to the hospital on Monday. It’s also shown that I am capable of being an EMT / Rettungsanitäter / Ambo driver, and conversations with the crews who came to the hospital show that my experience at the school were to say the least, atypical, and that there are other options locally.

Meanwhile I’m working out a way to get to the UK without flying, which as usual is proving pretty awkward. I’m trying to find a way from Rottertam Centraal railway station to the ferry port and the P and O website claims there is a bus running from the “Eurolines bus stop Conradstraat, against TNT Post, next to the Albeda building (at the station side of the walking bridge).” Which frankly doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think I’ve found the location on Google maps, but experience of these things is they are written by people who don’t know the city and have never ridden a bus in their life, so if anyone reading this knows Rotterdam and could confirm the information, I’d be grateful.

I’m also going to get some sleep, so if you could close the door quietly on your way out, that would be great. Thank you.

Old Friends

I was off in civilisation last week and went for a quick lurk in Stuttgart station (before the powers that be mess it up completely). While I was there these came in on a train from Ulm:

These are from the class 218, Deutsche Bahn’s standard diesel mixed traffic and passenger locomotive since the sixties, when they replaced steam. A bit like the UK’s class 47 and once a very common sight all over west Germany.

There are still quite large areas of rural Germany where these are common, because DB still runs a lot of locomotive-hauled trains and shows no sign of changing to multiple units. They even gained some contracts on the basis of having diesel locomotives and push pull trains with a driving trailer at the back, which has given rise to all kinds of speculation about what may one day displace the 218 locomotives. The possibilities for ‘off-the-peg’ locomotives are varied, here they are in order of personal preference, subjectively based on what I think looks nice and a complete lack of understanding about the working bits inside:

Siemens Vectron: C-C. compact, simple lines and clean design. Would look nice in bright red. (More pictures)

Bombadier TRAXX: Another C-C locomotive. the diesel versions are a proven design, being used by a number of private operaters on passenger services in Germany. They are also simple and attractive but the bodyshell is like the electric class 146 which is the standard local passenger locomotive around here and you can get too much of a good thing.

Vossloh Euro 4000: Nice enough, although the area around the cab looks a bit odd. (More pictures)

Vossloh Eurolight: Apparently a lightweight version of the 4000, designed as a ‘go anywhere‘ locomotive for broad, standard and narrow gauge use (but unlikely to appear on the Körschtalbahn any time soon) Direct Rail Services in the UK have ordered a set of these as the Class 68, but I expect they’ll have to redesign them to fit the loading gauge. (As with the Siemens Desiro classic and the UK versions)

Vossloh G2000 BB: I’m sure these are a freight locomotive. Let’s keep it that way please. I mean, they’re fine on the front of a load of intermodal wagons but on a passenger train they’d look very odd, and they have the aerodynamics of a brick.

Voith Maxima: I don’t know what Voith were thinking of when they came up with this. After much searching I think I’ve found one possible prototype. Definitely of the dark side are these.

Speaking of the dark side and the evil empire, more news on Stuttgart 21 coming soon.

Trial and error

[This is an edited version of a post in the other blog to keep people up to date. More 'on topic' material will hopefully follow soon.]

I’m back home. This was not part of the plan.

The plan (skip this if you’re read it before) was to go off to north Germany for just under a month and learn how to be an ambulance driver, come home in June, get eight weeks experience and go back for exams in the beginning of August. The plan worked, despite certain practical problems, right up to arriving at the school. Unfortunately that’s where things began to unravel.

The problem was not the many-headed monster, the language or any of the other stuff I was concerned about. It was decibels, specifically coming from our teacher.

He started shouting in the first lesson: this school wasn’t going to be ‘average’; it would be the best; we were going to be pushed to the limit; he’d make us stressed as far as we could bear and then some. Everything taught each day would have to be learned in its entirety by the next morning. It would be tested by pulling people up to the front and grilling them, and woe betide any student that was not Good Enough.

Quite what this was meant to achieve I don’t know: all it did for me was stop my brain working.

To stay I’d have to spend the next three weeks trying to make myself fit into the ethos of the school, and that wasn’t the sort of person I am or want to be, and wouldn’t have made me a better ambulance driver either, so after watching five people get shouted at for an entire lesson I packed my bags and came home.

Now I’m back, and with a bit more time than before, so maybe I’ll get some modelmaking done. I’ve got the carpentry apprenticeship place in September which means I’ll learn to make some baseboards. (I’m not doing three years of carpentry so I can make baseboards for my toy trains, honest), and I’m digging up the modelmaking things from the corners they have been lurking in. Mind you, it’s also planting season, and I still want to ride a century, and the boys seem to have broken their bikes in unusual ways while I was away, and I think it’s about time I unearthed some material I was writing for certain model railway magazines…

*Exams in Germany are typically graded from 1.0 (perfection) down to 4.9 or 5. Britain as usual has to be different so my grades are all in letters, which causes no end of confusion.