Yesterday we recieved a package about the weight and shape of a paving slab, courtesy of Deutsche Post. It turned out to be a copy of the ‘Conrad’ electronics catalogue, full of wonderful electronic items that I never knew existed or needed. They even have a model railway section, and when a major chain retailer stocks model railway bits it shows how much money there is in the hobby in Germany. This is the country that gave us HO scale digital automated fairgrounds with go-kart racing tracks that you can actually race the cars, and companies like Märklin and LGB, whose cheaper models cost upwards of €500.
The sheer mass of stuff you can get to jazz up model railways here is amazing, yet people buy them, filling the space between the tracks with all manner of whirring, whizzing or rotating wonderments. At the Sinsheim exhibition I went to, one model even had a castle with a long piece of stiff wire coming off the roof and an aeroplane on the end which was rotating slowly. At the same exhibition one company was demonstrating a cassette style fiddle yard that stored full-length gauge one trains in a magazine and automatically gave you the train you selected to run.
I’m not saying that these things are somehow ‘bad’, (although having worked in the third world, the amount of money in the industry does make me wonder) or that there are no ‘realistic’ model railways -There are many Germans making models from the simplest materials, which are historically accurate works of art and far beyond my abilities- just that the amount of readily available bells and whistles are quite mind-boggling for someone from outside of this culture.
The Conrad catalogue was at pains to point out that this was merely a ‘selection’ of what they produced: for a small fee you could order a variety of other paving slabs specialising in electrical gubbins for lighting, model making, or even model railways, but as I seem to be doing well without knowing half these things exist, I’m not too bothered. I used the catalogue to prop the door open and let the breeze in, and went off in search of some old cornflake packets and my craft knife to build something…
A motto of my life is K.I.S.S…. Keep It Simple Stupid. In this day and age of McEverything, people have forgotten what patience is as they strive to have everything immediately. I suppose that is why my interest in scratchbuilding and kitbashing is growing… I want to create my own models by exercising the gray mass taking up space between my ears.
I’m with you Dwayne- I find a model made using simple materials and imagination is gar more interesting and attractive than a train set with lots of money thrown at it.