Innholdsfortegnelse for JANUARY / FEBRUARY / MARCH 2025 - 120 i Voie Libre international

Trains de Rêve continues to expand its range: after a first locotractor and a bogie wagon in 0-16.5, the brand has released its CFD BB 400 in 0 scale metre gauge. The model is in 1/43.5 scale for 22.2mm gauge (compatible with 22.5mm gauge). It is designed in a very fine and sturdy photopolymer material, around a machined brass base. Both bogies are driven, with transmission of the motion via the coupling rods to the second, balanced, axle. The window seams and flush machined glazing are particularly neat! The lights and cab lights are operated by the factory-fitted ESU LokPilot V5 decoder. In a first phase, the CP 402, Vivarais 400.003, and CFC 404 and 405 versions are available for reservation. In September 2025, the model will also be available…

Model Scene is a Czech artisan firm specialized in scenic products for military dioramas and railway modelling in most usual scales. In addition to standard flocked mats and lignous vegetation, it has developed a very original range of small plants. They are made out of coloured etched material. Simply cut them out, fold them into shape and glue them in place on the layout. The result is surprisingly realistic. Naturally, these items are not suitable for decorating large surfaces. Cutting them out and shaping them is a bit tedious. But these small plants are helpful to enhance the detailing around buildings or the edge of a path. Nettles in a dank corner behind the engine shed or ivy colonizing a bit of masonry… MODEL SCENE www.model-scene.com Etched coloured plants Price:…

Diger Rossel s a different kind of modeller, who seeks out his inspiration in lesser known corners of the railway world, often in narrow gauge. He is keen on unusual topics, creations that are sometimes a bit batty, because he enjoys stepping off — or rather, getting his modeller's hands off — the beaten track. For some time, he had been observing North-American railways. But the topic, despite being extensive, is well covered, and even used in the large Disney amusement parks… Now, how about that for an idea: a mining railway located in an amusement park! The layout at a glance Scale: H0 (1/87) Gauge: 9 mm Control: on-off Them: amusement park Dimensions: 120 × 60 cm François Fontana: Diger, tell us something about how the project got off…

Among these new references, we assembled the country house Ref. 87VIL319 and the repair garage Ref. 87VIL316. Both belong to the ready-to-assemble range of Architecture & Passion, and require no paint. The kits contain all that is needed to assemble the building: a solid infrastructure made out of 3mm thick woodboard, to which several layers of 0.5mm thick coloured card cladding are added. The doors and windows, glued from the inside, fit perfectly into the apertures, with no adjustments required. Sheets of transparent plastic for the glazing complete the assembly of the inside part. ARCHITECTURE & PASSION https://www.architecture-passion.fr Price: ca. €40 and 60 NEW TECHNIQUE The innovation appears on the outside: the coarse stone walls are laser-cut out of the 0.5mm thick card, material is removed to give reproduce the…

The track crosses the waterfall over a lightly-built girder bridge before reaching the station. I called upon the Scape Supplies and Sculpture Block products for the ground cover, the cliffs, the blocks of rock and the gravel. THE WATERFALL SITE The waterfall is inspired by the site of Courmes, in the Alpes Maritimes département. It will be the main scenic feature on the right-hand side of the layout. Space being at a premium, I opted to model in decreasing scales, rather like stage scenery in successive planes. The railway bridge is modelled in 1/43.5 scale, the background with the drinks stall in 1/87 scale, while an intermediary plane, identifiable by the presence of a figure, is designed in 1/60 scale. When it comes to the cliffs, modelling a specific scale…

Eight units of this type were built between 1934 and 1941, for the MEG network, by Waggonfabrik Gotha. Railcars T1 to T8 could carry 33 passengers seated and 27 standing. This new version comes in red livery, with the early-1960s Jägermeiβter advertisement. The model is supplied pre-fitted with a NEM 662 Next 18 socket, but to digitize it, the inside lighting wire must be desoldered and connected to an AUX terminal on the decoder for the latter to operate; the Next 18 sockets only have four usable amplified outlets, all are already taken up by the white and red lights. TILLIG REF. H0-12: 02948 REF. H0-9: 02958 PRICE OBSERVED 280 TO €310…

(‘Rediscovering the Chemins de Fer d'intérêt local de l'Herault’) Delightful! A trip back in time, as if we had been there. And as the scenes Philippe Marassé tells us about were not photographed for posterity, Pierre Galtier has recreated them in the form of water-colours. Each plate tells a story about a place, a monument, an anecdote, a moment in a journey. The Italian format helps us enjoy Pierre's drawings, explained in detail through Philippe's captions. A small map provides the location of each illustration on one of the lines of the Hérault secondary railway network. This self-published book is available from the author for €35. LES CHEMINS DE FER D'INTÉRÊT LOCAL DE L'HÉRAULT RETROUVÉS PMCH.GALTIER@WANADOO.FR…

CARDBOARD AND PLASTER Not having found the right match, or rather the right-sized dwelling, Olivier Audouin decided to scratchbuild one out of cardboard, filling medium and various strips. He imagined this bakery shop located on a street corner, in a town in South-West France, in the 1980s-1990s.…

On such a surface, the curves have a very sharp radius, 150 mm. As no rolling stock is available commercially in this scale and gauge, I was facing a double sentence: the locomotive as well as the trailers would have to be scratchbuilt… I had never done this! Rules In your workshop, on your workbench, there are models and kits that you have designed, built, modified, decorated… These models deserve to be shown, deserve that you insist on a way of doing things, an individual touch. Send us a short text, a few high-definition and well-lit photographs, an explanatory or technical diagram. Publication in the magazine will come with a free subscription (or the extension of a subscription). Grab your tools! I used my scrapbox: by blending odds and ends…

Scale 1/43.5 Drawings Vincent Lepais Wooden-bodied tub Scale 1/43,5. Drawings Vincent Lepais 1200 litre steel oval-shaped tub Scale 1/43,5. Drawings Vincent Lepais Scale 1/43,5. Drawings Vincent Lepais Spoils tub 8-seater staff wagon with wooden chassis Scale 1/20. Drawings Vincent Lepais Scale 1/20. Drawings Vincent Lepais 8-seater staff wagon with wooden chassis Scale 1/20. Drawings Vincent Lepais 8-seater staff wagon with wooden chassis…

The origins of this layout are to be found in a narrow gauge micro-layout project published in 2019 in the monthly Loco-Revue. A somewhat crazy undertaking that the Editor of our sister-magazine had designed as rather weird, to help free up our imagination. What the Editor had not foreseen was how Jacques Boileau would interpret the project historically in a very gifted way. While taking trouble to remain faithful to the original project, Jacques projected it into real life, giving it strength and realism. This is the story we are going to tell. Whatever you read and see from now on is pure fiction, and that is precisely why it must be believed! François Fontana: Hello Jacques, we are familiar with your standard gauge creations located around Touraine; but here,…

Here is a new Era III version (overhauls dated November 1962 and May 1963) of two Harz railway carriages stored at Wernigerode. They are numbered n° 900-484 (construction Wismar 1926) and 900-489 (Wismar 1929), long before their rebuilds in the mid-1980s. The liveries are green with black roof, and the models are supplied with add-on parts that must be fitted: brake hoses, reproductions of the central buffers with side-mounted couplers, should the modeller so wish. TILLIG REF. H0-12: 13996 REF. H0-9: 03996 PRICE OBSERVED: FROM 105 TO €120…

The Romanian electronics manufacturer Train O Matic has just added to its range a new ‘stay alive’ device, an energy reserve that is described as one of the smallest on the market. Called SPP nano, its PCB measures 13mm by 6 and the two 0.3 F supercapacitators 12mm by 4! Juste enough to supply a sound decoder for 5 to 7 seconds and avoid sound interruptions when passing over a power gap. The PCB is supplied wired. It must be connected to both capacitators, paying attention to their polarity, and to the + and – terminals of most decoders. TRAIN O MATIC HTTPS://TRAIN-O-MATIC.COM SPP-NANO AVAILABLE FROM TRAMFABRIEK WWW.TRAMFABRIEK.COM PRICE: CA. €18…

A few models displayed in 2022 and 2023 are now being delivered, such is the case for the POC/ CFC Mallet. Other models have popped up suddenly, such as the CFD parcels trailers, others appear to be still on their way, but have been for so long now that it would seem they have been routed onto the wrong track! LEMATEC The 040-040 T Mallet of the POC (POC and CFC) in H0-12 is now being delivered to subscribers. A few units are still available from retailers (ca. 1800 euros). ATELIER DU TACOT The R40 parcels trailer of the CFD Vivarais is available in kit form, consisting of 3D printed and etched parts. Price: 35 euros plus postage. Built by Le Cheylard workshops, it is supplied with two buffers compatible…

In the imaginary geography of Somme-et-Marne, Berlandmont is adjacent to Quittancourt. The former is the terminus of one of the three branches originating from Quittancourtgare. In the new configuration of the layout (see VL 119), the three exits leading to the fiddleyards are very – too – close together. Barely 10cm for two of them. The most elegant solution to this problem was to build the outskirts of the village of Berlandmont so that they would conceal the stretches of track that were too close to each other. Because the layout is located in the Liberated Region area and because of the constraints of post-WWI reconstruction, most of the structures are either temporary or new. They call on wood, brick and concrete. I decided to model all these materials using…

WOOD, CARD, CLAY For the waterfall halt on the 0 scale layout, I needed a tiny structure that could combine two functions: an office for the station master – train guard, and a waiting room for the passengers. As the company was not expecting significant revenues, it opted for a simple shelter with a wood structure and a brick infill, coated with mortar. I decided to use the same technique, by building a structure out of 4mm square wood strips, with the gaps filled by a layer of terra-cotta bricks clad in a coat of protective mortar flush with the woodwork. THE MATERIALS The wood I used comes straight from the funfair, 4mm square sticks used by candy-floss makers – usually, it is food-grade beech, The bricks are made out…

Once mined, ore must be shipped in the best possible condition and as swiftly as possible. This applies particulalrly to coal, whose merchant value depends on the size of the blocks. What steam engine drivers used to call «duck feathers» (small coals) will sell for far less than large blocks, especially where heavy industry is involved. Therefore, the collieries developped railway-based haulage systems to carry the coal from the cutting face to the washing and transformation sites without the need for transshipment. ORIGINS OF THE BLANZY HAULAGES The Blanzy surface railway was described in Issue n° 115 of Voie Libre (October-November-December 2023). Let's now take a look at the underground haulage. It seems it was first put into place at La Pelouse shaft. At first, workmen were in charge of…

THE MODELE AT A GLANCE Scale: 1/87 Gauge: 9 and 12mm Model: SPMR UNIC-CODRA locotractor from the Régie de l'Ain network Control: analogue Equipement: 6-pin socket Motor: coreless Price announced: 179.90€ Availability: February 2025 What do you mean, it looks ugly? One must not judge on appearances! True, it's far from drop-dead gorgeous, but all the same, with its two large bonnets and its high outside chassis frames, it's quite striking. And it's almost unique, as only two units were built in 1936 by the SPMR (Société Parisienne de Matériel Roulant) for the Régie de l'Ain network, which used to operate the metre gauge lines of that département. Fitted with a UNIC-CODRA motor, a fast diesel built in France under Mercedes-Benz licence, and developing 105hp., these two engines replaced steam locomotives for shunting duties and hauling goods…

The BD Concepts driving bogies were reviewed at the time of their release. It is time now to move onto serious stuff and put them to work. For this project, I selected an Atlas static tramway in H0 scale, a model that caught my fancy when it apperared on the market, because it was rather incredible and completely unknown to me: a Hong Kong model with an enclosed top deck and a very narrow loading gauge, rather like a paperback placed on its side. I dreamt of seeing this “thingamajig” run. Thanks to the BD Concepts driving bogie, this has come true. THE DRiViNG BOGiE The casing contains a coreless motor fitted with two worm gears. They drive two angled gears fitted to the driving axles. One of the axles…