Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2025 i Continental Modeller

The well-known modeller of the Saxon narrow gauge Jens Petermann got to know Siegfried Seidl and Jochen Klinger when they exhibited their HOe layout of Ehrenfriedersdorf station in the town hall of that mountain town in the Erzgebirge where they lived. They talked about the modelling possibilities of Thum network. One possible project was the Greifenbachtal bridge, but Jochen Klinger only saw the difficulty – not the structure itself, but the many trees! Master tree modeller Jens responded that that was the least of the problems, and so a firm modelling friendship was formed. They intended to model the Greifenbachtal bridge exactly to 1:87. Jochen had already worked intensively on and perfected the drawing of files for laser cutting components for the Schützhausbrücke Ehrenfriedersdorf HOe layout, so this technology was…

When you are designing a layout, you are immediately faced with various choices. One of them is the choice between a fixed installation or portable sections. After having built a fixed few layouts when I was younger, when a house move was announced work that had taken years was unfortunately lost. You learn from experience. So the next project would be in sections. Before I decided exactly what it would be, we went on a trip. In the early 1990s I regularly went to the Belgian Ardennes – what a beautiful region. I often came to quiet rural places where the peace was suddenly disturbed by the roar of large, powerful diesel locomotives and their beautiful sound. I saw how they pulled heavy coke trains at a fairly low speed…

Please send details for possible inclusion to: Peco Publications & Publicity Ltd., Beer, Devon, EX12 3NA. Telephone: 01297 21542E-mail: clubs@railwaymodeller.co.uk Saturday 19 July CRAWLEY, West Sussex Clubroom Open DayOrganiser: Seaboard Southern Model Railroad Group.Venue: Hut 13, Tilgate Park Recreation Centre, Tilgate Drive (off Brighton Road), Crawley, RH10 5PH.Open: 1000-1600Admission: free.Amenities: free on-site parking; wheelchair access; complimentary tea/coffee.Features: members showcasing extensive HO and N layouts, also On30 models on display. Secondhand items for sale.Contact: Malcolm Dickie (Secretary) 07915 068816.E-mail: Malcolm.g.dickie@gmail.comWebsite: www.seaboard-southern.org.uk Saturday 19 & Sunday 20 July CHATHAM, Kent Organiser: Chatham & District MRC supported by Bachmann Europe plc.Venue: Historic Dockyard, Slip 5, Main Gate Road, Chatham, ME4 4TZ.Open: Saturday 1000-1700 Sunday 1000-1600 0930 entry for advance tickets.Admission: adult advance tickets £9.00, on the door £10.00. U16s free with paying adult.Amenities:…

This attractive layout is fictitious but largely inspired by the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée stations of Lods (a terminus) and l’Hôpital-du-Grosbois on the Loue Valley line in Haut-Doubs, in the Doubs department in eastern France. The chosen period is the 1950s-1960s. The layout has been shown at around thirty exhibitions in France over the past five years, culminating in major events such as Meursault (December 2022), Chambéry (October 2023) and even Intermodellbau in Dortmund (April 2024). The layout measures just 4m x 1.6m and represents a single track standard gauge secondary line leading to the terminus of Saint-Bernard-du-Grosbois. The location The name comes first from the l‘Hôpital-du-Grosbois which inspired the model and whose main elements (station building, goods shed, loco shed and turntable, as well as the track plan) were arranged to provide…

Location and layout background You may well ask why this layout is called Arcadia Pennsylvania Terminal, especially given that Arcadia is a small township of approximately one hundred people, going back to around 1900 as a coal town in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, and does not have a railroad connection. The layout was never intended but in early 2016, during a visit to my local model shop, Arcadia Models, I happened to see an immaculate Atlas O Pennsylvania ALCO RS-1 diesel locomotive on the so-called ‘bargains table’. At the time, my main interest was focused on European HO/HOm and American HO, and the gradually improving British OO stock was also beginning to appeal. So there was absolutely no interest haunting me about O. Indeed, my wife, who jointly operates at shows,…

Small petrol or diesel powered locomotives, or ‘critters’, may be homely, even ugly to some, but for me they have a certain appeal. The Jianghe coal railway in central China had a fleet of home-made machines adapted from road vehicles and, captivated by the equipment as well as the setting of the railway itself, I knew that one day I would have to attempt a model. The choice of motive power was not its only unusual feature. Most of China’s narrow gauge railways were constructed during the post-revolutionary period and were of 760mm (30") gauge. Departing from the norm, Jianghe was 2' and from an earlier era, having been constructed by a British entrepreneur before the First World War. Another unusual feature was its track. The ties or sleepers were…

Long term readers of CM may recall the February 1997 edition with my article on producing the rubber-tyred Montréal Métro MR-63 cars in HO. As a former resident of Montréal, regular Métro rider, and life-long railway modeller, it was inevitable that I would construct a model of the Paris-inspired Métro system. The article covered my attempts at experimenting with homemade resin components, and how I eventually turned to whitemetal casting. I fabricated master components and then made rubber moulds to enable me to cast multiple whitemetal pieces, to produce the components to construct two three-car elements. Time moves quickly in urban transit, and the 52-year-old Montréal MR-63 cars (Matériel Roulant conçu en 1963, or rolling stock designed in 1963) were withdrawn and scrapped between 2016 and 2018, being replaced by…

The largest bridge on the narrow gauge in Saxony (De gruße Brick in the local dialect) was 180m long and spanned the Greifenbach Valley near Geyer at a height of 36m. It was first used in timetabled service on 1st May 1906. After the first section of the Schönfeld – Meinersdorf (SM) line was opened to Geyer in 1888, the section on to Thum had to wait another eighteen years before operations began. The Keller & Hildebrand company from Großluga (now Dresden-Niedersedlitz) built this bridge at kilometre 10.661. Work began in 1904 with the clearing of areas on both sides of the stream. After the space had been created for building, the abutments were built first on the Geyer side and later on the Thum side of the valley, plus…

This layout is tinged with not a little sadness as it was built and named for my wife Margaret (Meg to most of us) who passed away in July last year. Meg was an integral part of our layout building and exhibiting. She loved snow scenes and thus the setting of Megsdorf could not be anything else. The general picture The layout depicts a small station and freight yard on a truncated branch line somewhere in southern Germany. An additional source of traffic is provided by a small brewery accessed by a private gated siding. It is certainly an exercise in minimalism, measuring just 2.1m x 0.4m (approximately 7' x 1'6") on two boards. The main scenic area is a laser-cut plywood canopy board from Grainge & Hodder. The second…

After my operational diorama Bw Rheinbrück (see www.bw-rheinbrueck.de) had become outdated, I wanted to build a new one, preferably a steam depot, as I have a large collection of HO steam locos. I also wanted to reduce the effort required for transport and assembly/disassembly for exhibitions. Thus, the idea of building a foldable layout that could fit in the boot of a midsize car matured. The resulting layout is 3m long and 50cm wide. It consists of three 80cm x 50cm and three 30cm x 50cm baseboards, each 19mm thick, connected by hinges. When folded up, it measures 80cm x 50cm x 60cm. The subject is a locomotive maintenance facility in the Epoch III–IV period. A Fleischmann turntable is located between the two loco sheds, which was rarely seen in real…