Introducing St Blasien - Part 1
This all started in 1997 when I went to visit a friend who was at university in Germany. Rather than fly, I decided to go by train, via Eurostar to Brussels and then the famous 'Ost-West Express' on to Cologne. When that international train formed of Polish, German and even Russian coaches (complete with enormous-hatted Russian army officers in one compartment) pulled in it was like being in a spy film - I was hooked.
The year after I spent two happy months Inter-Railing around Europe (coinciding with the World Cup in France, but that's another story!). At the time I was working for a well known model railway shop in Sheffield. When I got back to work, there happened to be a second-hand DB Class 103 electric (my favourite) on the shelf and, of course, I had to have a souvenir of my trip. There were still plenty of 103s working at the time and I'd had several memorable trips behind them, including a magical evening journey west out of Vienna on the Budapest-Vienna-Paris 'Orient Express' (the proper one, not the expensive re-creation!) with 17 coaches of French, Austrian and Hungarian origin.
But, once I had the loco, it needed a train. And so, there soon followed a train of DB blue/white InterRegio stock, a few SNCF Corail coaches, a DB Class 218 diesel (another favourite) and so on, and so on! I find European railways endlessly fascinating, but it was Germany, France and Switzerland that really captured my imagination. Gradually, a few SNCF and SBB items started to appear too.
Although the collection continued to grow, there was nowhere permanent to run it, until we moved into a larger house a couple of years ago. I'm very fortunate that my wife understands my hobby (or at least tolerates it!) and one of the conditions for the new house was that it had space for a model railway. In the meantime, I tried to soak up as much information as possible from books and magazines, and it provided me with a great excuse for regular 'research' trips!
With locos and stock from these three countries, there was really only one area of Europe that I could set the layout - the corner of south-west Germany that borders on to the Alsace region of France and Switzerland, around Basel. Fortunately, not only is this region interesting from a railway point of view, as part of the Black Forest (Schwarzwald) it's also scenically very pretty. As an added bonus, it's also the home of Faller, the kit manufacturer, which offers a large range of Schwarzwald buildings in HO scale, which might prove useful.
And the name? High up in the hills is a small town with a large cathedral and a name that will ring bells with anyone familiar with Cornish railways. Although the railway never reached the real St Blasien (the closest current railhead is at Seebrugg, a few kms away), I couldn't resist stealing the name for my proposed layout. All I needed now was a plan that could realistically incorporate trains from three countries in a 14ft by 14ft room! Part 2 coming soon.
