I leave New Zealand in four weeks. I'm really looking forward to coming home, but I will miss NZ and particularly Wellington. However, I think I will be able to visit every couple of years, so the wrench isn't too great. I plan to time my visits around the NZAMRC conventions!

Bad Horn spent most of the summer in the garage, as we had visitors for a lot of the time. A few weeks ago a friend who hadn't run it came around, and so we set it up in the spare room and had a play using my DBAG (ex DR) trains. Ignore the DB signalling, and imagine that rather than being in the Teutoberger Wald, the location is the Erzgebirge or Oberlausitz.

The normal branch service is a 202 and two all-second Halberstadts. Here 202 809 has just uncoupled and is moving away to run around its train.

A peak time service is a little longer, with some first class accommodation. A 219 operates in push-pull mode. Unfortunately the Roco Steuerwagen really shows up the basic nature of the Sachsenmodelle coaches. The second picture also shows up a weakness of my Nikon 18-105 lens, that when using small aperture I get ghosting on the left side if its furthest from the camera and focal point. I'd like to get a fixed lens soon.

There's some freight still on the branch. A grubby Ludmilla is in charge today, arriving, running round and then taking the loaded vans out of the compound. The load is beer. What better could there be?

My 202 has sadly given up the ghost, so the 219 is substituting. This pic is also to show off my shunt signals. I don't know what the problem is, I've thoroughly cleaned the wheels and pickups and made a visual check of the wiring, I need to make sure that it's not the decoder by doing some tests on DC. I also tried Krois couplings on this loco, and found them to be less reliable than the Roco equivalents. For a long time the 202 has been my most reliable loco, so its apparent demise is surprising.

And that's the sort of look when running circa 2000. I'd like to add a 298 to the fleet, that would be far more appropriate on the trip freight than a 232. I'd also like to make a new station building, paint the waiting shelter and add some lamps. For now though, my focus is packing it up well for the big move. I'd love to exhibit this at RailEx, so that I could have exhibited the same layout at Rail-Ex New Zealand and RailEx UK!

Unrelated to Bad Horn, I keep coming back to the idea of modelling Niebüll NEG and Dagebüll Mole stations on opposite sides of a garage- both are the right sort of size, and modelling the entire fleet normally present on the line is not too much of a challenge, although there are gaps in every scale. The most surprising gap in H0 is that of a scale length Bpmbdzf, the Intercity (not ex InterRegio) Steuerwagens- through Intercity coaches hauled by railcars are a notable feature of this line, save for Plandampf weekends when steam is in charge!