readingtype

Final final point, despite being a little delicate these couplings were designed for serious use, specifically at FREMO meetings where running longish trains and doing lots of shunting is important. They couple and uncouple brilliantly if the height is correct and don't snag as much as the conventional NEM design.

These are H0fine's OBK138. There's also 139 which is for vehicles with a deep bufferbeam or front 'skirt' -- small diesel shunters and railbuses for example. Yes, I have fitted the wagon couplings too. These have a loop of nicely magnetic steel wire that comes pre-bent. It would be a total pain to make! I thought the cast nickel silver ones were a little OTT (how dreadful to treat wagons as second rate, but there are more of them to work on). The plastic OBK120s fit the bill pretty well and are not that difficult to assemble; there is a central hook/turnbuckle/shaft silhouette laser cut from something vaguely acrylic and either side are triangular reinforcements that vaguely resemble the shackles that are cut from a similar plastic. The assembly work is slotting three 0.4mm n/s wire dowels into holes in the profile and sliding the triangular reinforcements over each side. You fit them through the convenient hole left by the moulded coupling hook if you are lucky enough to have a wagon made that way; otherwise careful drilling is needed and a 3D printed plug that turns a drilled hole back into a rectangular one (to stop the coupling rotating around its shaft) is available. It is made to look like the flanges above and below the prototype coupling hook. There's a jig (Einbaulehre) that is very helpful. In fact there are two, and the first one I got has lines marking the correct buffer height. Don't put the buffers of anything by Fleischmann or (deeper breath) Märklin against that without knowing what you are doing :-) The second can be fitted with a projecting knitting needle to stab a proffered bufferbeam at the right spot to start drilling. In theory OBKs should be used with sprung buffers. If you think about this, it gives a couple of mm at most of 'grace' on a sharp curve. Other things may well not be going well for the wagons involved by the time this is needed. I prefer to let the couplings project a little futher; if you fit them as designed you get a lovely close coupling and another mm doesn't really harm the appearance. R1 curves, forget them. OF course there were and are some very sharp curves out there in the world but vehicles are not always coupled together wherever they go ... Speaking of the appearance, what you can do with both the loco and wagon couplings is completely lose the NEM pocket. Have a look under the vehicle after this has been done and you soon realise how much realism can be gained by taking things away! (In the photo above the hook should actually be behind the buffer heads rather than in front). Final point: the plastic is not mega strong and I have already suffered some broken ones (the obvious weak point is the neck where the shaft enters the buffer beam). Etched metal would be more resilient.

Today's activity, as it turned out, was to install Originalbügelkupplungen (OBKs) in my Roco H0 model of the Österreichische Bundesbahnen (ÖBB) Reihe 93 (formerly Reihe 378, see Wikipedia page (German, the English one has very little text)). More about the loco below; but to introduce them OBKs are a brilliant way to improve the look of an H0 model by replacing the large clumsy coupling. They simply disappear, while working perfectly with the conventional NEM loop coupling. You can just about see them in the photo. This is a locomotive design I immediately loved when I first came across it. The 93 is a 2-8-2 classic allrounder tank loco, lots of small wheels giving plenty of torque for steep gradients and spreading the weight so it can run on lightly laid secondary lines. Although dating from the 1920s, members of the class were running right up to the very end of Austrian main line steam. Regrettably for me, this event happened very shortly before I was born and so the first chance I got to see one was on a visit to the remarkable Strasshof depot not far from Vienna. Austrian locos have a look. It's hard to say exactly what it is, but the balance of elegance and steampunk is distinctive. Some locos had a brass ring around the chimney about half way up which is something like wearing a bandanna or a choker or ... I don't know. Many designs had truly wacky bits and bobs such as two domes with a pipe running between them (at least once through a sandbox in between), or the Brotan boiler which, well to be honest I don't really know what to say about that either. Looks disastrous but apparently it wasn't. Then there are cast iron disc wheels, found on all sorts of different low-speed locos, which most of the class originally had. There were two significant design constraints and these definitely left their mark. Firstly, Austria's supplies of coal were low grade. This meant thinking about how to make the best of what was available and on larger locos which rapidly chewed through fuel it there was a need for large wide fireboxes; this wasn't such an issue for a humble tank loco. Secondly, keeping weight down was important. Again, with six axles and a weight of 66 tons in running order this would not be a huge problem, but the ethos was there and of course the material saved was money saved up front and for every kilometer run. The desire to save weight led to frames with lots of cut-outs in them, generally rectangles with radiused corners to spread the stresses around them. On the 93 the boiler is raised fairly high and the alignment of the side tanks, cab and bunker leave open spaces which can be seen through. These are at a height where a standing observer can see through from one side to the other, sometimes through several intervening parts of the frame or thin supporting flanges and struts. The final distinctive feature, which this model has, is the Giesl Ejector -- including the narrow oblong chimney. This was designed by the Austrian engineer Dr.-Ing. Adolph Giesl-Gieslingen -- to Anglo-Saxon ears a rather grand name, but Giesel-Gieslingen seems to have been a genial and friendly as well as erudite man. He wrote an accessible history of the final years of steam designs in Austria, including trials he took part in (book details below). According to the British railway author O S Nock he was happy to roll up his sleeves and get involved when it came to trialling the ejector on various British locomotives. In Britain it wasn't considered a success but it apparently added a hundred horsepower or more to the Reihe 93. I believe that this success goes back to the fact that burning low energy, dusty coal is difficult partly because the fire won't burn nicely. I have read that really good blast pipe and chimney make a difference not by creating super-strong jets of steam but by being just right to keep the fire happily aerated so everything is burned without constricting the cyliders so the exhaust steam can't escape freely. On with the task: fitting OBKs front and rear. The whole model strikes me as a brilliant example of commercial model loco design. Dismantling it reveals the experience of the design team, taking advantage of that common baseline running along the bottom of the side tanks, the cab and the bunker. They were able to hollow out this space to place a circuit board for the DCC chip, the lights and the motor. The walls of the space are thick cast metal giving plenty of weight and a moulded plastic outer sleeve slides over the whole thing to carry the surface details representing the prototype. I caution anyone considering opening the model: take your time. It all comes apart very nicely but it offers few hints. The instruction booklet isn't very good on this point. Communication is entirely by diagrams, but I only discovered by trying for some time that is is not possible to remove the side tanks, bunker and cab until you have removed the boiler (screw hidden in the dome, that was clear from the diagram) and the cab roof. Naturally just after succeeding to carefully remove the tank, cab side and bunker moulding I broke a detail part through slight mishandling. In common with many H0 models, if you remove the moulded coupling hook from the bufferbeam you reveal a slot exactly the right size for an OBK to go into. Behind the bufferbeam, things are a bit different. The design of this part of the model is extremely ingenious, and hard to describe. Both ends of the model use a similar component to bridge between the bufferbeam and the main chassis. The space under the bunker means the same design challenges are found at the rear as at the front. The part is a cast metal beam that carries the buffers and the NEM coupling at one end. At the other, it is anchored to the chassis with pins and then sandwiched in place so it cannot wobble or twist. Very fortunately, the OBK's shaft slides straight into the slot on the rear bufferbeam which is deep enough to accommodate its full length. The front bufferbeam needs more work; here the guide for the coupling mount is positioned so that the slot cannot be so deep. By drilling out some of the material that forms this guide and by shortening the coupling shaft slightly, the one can be made to fit in the other. To others wanting to follow: just remember to go very slowly, remove material bit by bit and keep trying the fit. Have you read that ever before? Finally: a note on the superb replacement wheels. These are to RP-25 profile and were done by Holger Gräler who offers re-wheeling as a commercial service. Here, he has put new nickel silver tyres onto the original Roco centres. Impressive. Dr.-Ing. Giesl-Gieslingen's book is: Die Ära nach Gölsdorf. Die letzten 3 Jahrzehnte des österreichischen Dampflokomotivbaus, Verlag Slezak, Wien 1981 OBKs come from H0fine: www.h0fine.com

Thanks for sharing that, it's quite a picture. Not sure I could handle having it on the wall at home though. Apart from the overwhelming twilight beige tone that gives a lot of the overt atmosphere (which I love to see in a model, more DDR layouts please), there are a lot of different, contraditory, and more or less sinister layers to it. Trains are (generally) easier, though I don't actually have any of those on the wall either. For shame! :-)

Was just about to mention Conrad. See also English version of their site and don't be put off by the machine translations :-) I bought the two-arm signal kit (largely out of curiosity) and it has the 'schmalmast' -- a thin mast made of two upright girders with fillets welded between them -- rather than the conventional lattice construction. This was used in locations where clearance was tight, but (according to the GRS German Signalling Guide if I recall correctly) it spread to other locations too -- as so often what got used was what was available. The kit looks good to me; clean mouldings, super-fiddly LEDs if you want to illuminate it. Had it for ages and I haven't finished building it yet! Ben

I had a look in a reputable dictionary. It offers das Kopfende and das Oberes Ende. Would that reflect the 'Head' in the English name? If it's actually a place where the ground sticks up then maybe you want something with Berg in it...

The running boards, bufferbeams and frames are now basically assembled, so here's a trial assembly of the various parts. I couldn't resist trial fitting the (turned steel) buffers. The shanks basically fitted straight into the cast holes. That strikes me as pretty clean accurate casting! You can see one of the rear ones isn't quite true.

Hi Les You could start here: https://www.modellbahndecals.de/Logos/DB/DB-alt/ On that page you can choose the DB 'Keks' (biscuit) logo in various different colours (see the RAL numbers in the listings). They are all waterslide transfers. If you need to ask any questions, you can write in English and Herr Nothaft will I think be well able to reply. Ben

There's nobody coming round, and I can't get to the club, so I have decided the time is right to start on my first whitemetal loco kit build. This is an H0 model of the Deutsche Bundesbahn BR V36 (later BR 236), a three-axle, 360hp diesel-hydraulic shunter that was originally ordered for the German Army in the second world war and proved to be a (rough and ready) survivor, with examples travelling beyond Europe and remaining in use for several decades. It is a Weinert kit, manufactured about 25 years ago and bought second hand a while back, though it is still in the current Weinert catalogue (article number 0024). I'm guided by the excellent build report written by Steph Dale 14 years ago and there's no point in me adding rookie comments; his experience comes through clearly. What I do want to record is how straightforward and gratifying it has been to solder the main parts together. Weinert's instructions recommend gluing everything. As Steph reported, the way things fit together shows that gluing was probbaly the intended construction method (and not just a recommendation). But with a realtively fine-bit soldering iron at 230C, some liquid flux and a litle 100C solder, it is remarkably easy to get a nice seam of solder along the joins between largish parts like the bonnet sides and top. By the way, the swooshes of darker colour are some discolouration or impurity in the metal, not where I've been splashing liquid around. This is the inside of the bonnet and you can see I've managed a pretty neat seam along the join between the radiator at the left end and the side panel. There's a little spot I have missed towards the right hand end of the join between the side panel and the top. The right hand piece is the front cab bulkhead which is loosely fitted to help locate the bonnet panels. Here's the outside showing the same side and the radiator end along with the top. All pretty clean and tidy. The step between the back of the radiator and the roof is negligible in reality. The reasons everything is going well so far seem to me: Well designed parts Nicely cast, so although like anything cast in whitemetal there is a bit of bowing this can be easily straightened out by very gently bending between the fingers and offering up to a straight edge And on my part, taking plenty of time to carefully remove the very modest amount of flash on the mouldings, to offer things up, to look at the fit and true of things, and then to check again. Here's a trial fit of the frames, bufferbeams and running board. The wheels, jackshaft, coupling rods, gears, motor and pickup come ready-mounted to the inner chassis (black), so in this kit there is no pressure to get the chassis running properly. So far so good. As a beginner, I think this is what you want from a kit project. Not terrifyingly complex, but a challenge that seems achieveable. Since returning to the hobby, I've been gradually investigating the skills and techniques I remember reading about as a kid. I can't magically acquire skills I didn't have then, but I do have a bit more patience nowadays so I'm in with a chance. And I'm looking forward to the rest of the build. NB for anyone interested in building this kit, the instructions are naturally enough in German. There are British equivalent kits -- Britain really being the home of the whitemetal model railway kit -- but I happened to want to build a loco in line with my current German H0 interests, and I wanted to try a Weinert kit. And finally, it's worth knowing that a British whitemetal kit at list price will cost you less than a Weinert one. The feature photo is V36 211, built by BMAG in Berlin in 1942, photographed at the Bavarian Railway Museum (BEM) Nördlingen in June 2019.

A couple of weeks back I attended a meeting of UK FREMO members. It was a weekend running session following the FREMO norms as far as possible, although our group is quite small and our arrangement (the way the modules are combined into a minature railway network) was fairly modest. Lots of our modules don't yet have scenery, but we were able to borrow a set of club-built modules allowing us the luxury of a pretty large terminus complete with a running shed. We did have a phone system, and ran to a timetable using a clock running at five times real time, but we don't yet have enough wagon cards set up to allow us to get into the nitty gritty of sending and receiving loads at each station. There was though quite enough going on to keep everyone pretty busy. I ran my own station, Wasserbach (alas so far totally bereft of scenery). I found that, despite the fact that I had a pretty light set of services to look after, getting shunting done in good time to clear the arrival road in time for the next passenger train was a challenge (that I wasn't always up to). We were fortunate to have a video of part of the session so you can get a bit of an idea of the event. Thank you to Ewan's Trains and Buses. The photo shows a BR 41 running light engine in reverse, back from Wasserbach to the depot at Regensburg through one of the modules with finished scenery. It couldn't be used on a return freight service as my station doesn't have a turntable and the loco had no front coupling!

Here it is, still incomplete, on the turntable at Neuhausen after the running session at today's UK FREMO group meeting. Note hand of God breathing life into the brewery in the background. A budget Zimo chip is now in the tender so it can run on FREMO arrangements which are I think exclusively DCC. I wonder if the loco had never run before I got it, as about three hours of test track circuits recently seem to have helped it become a smoother runner. The chip (added just a few days ago) rounds this off. By the way there's a newly-published French-language publication on the 140 C from Le Train, with the descriptive title 'Les 140 C', and I was lucky to be able to pick up a copy at the French Railways Society Winter Rendezvous earlier this month. It has lots of good pictures (some colour) along with a pretty comprehensive description of the lives and times of these locos. Ben

The answer might depend on whether your priority is appearance, running, robustness or ease of maintenance. I can report that the Brawa one is, in line with their approach to modelmaking, quite delicate; you need to take time and care to dismantle it. I don't have experience of Roco's model, but it's probably more robust. Ben

A couple of sessions on the club test track show that 1) the front axle needed a bit more play (it now has 1mm of spacing washers each side) and 2) the brake blocks, already filed back, need to get thinner still as they're doing what brake blocks are meant to do. They are also now preventing the front axle from having adequate side play. My approach is to file them at an angle, taking away as little as possible so as to limit the degree to which they are weakened. In the end I have a feeling they may have to be replaced with metal ones that are set further apart -- after all the originals are intended for wheels almost 2mm closer together, even if they do swing side to side a lot.

I've summarised what I have been doing to see if the OR wheels can be taken out to EM. I stuck the report on my RM Web blog. Track tests pending.

OK so I'm one of the (Oxford Rail) N7 fans. I pretty much have to be, as I am working on this layout project. Fortunately I already was a fan as I currently live in Homerton (on the east side of Hackney in London) not far from the the Great Eastern Railway line on its viaduct running up through Cambridge Heath, London Fields and Hackney Downs. This was one of the chief routes on which the N7 was used and a little bit of reading got me interested in the whole history of the GER, the only 'full size' railway company to concentrate all its loco and rolling stock building and all serious maintenance in London. The N7 is both quite an interesting loco in its own right and very much a representative of the railway that built it. Anyway enough of that. This post is an adjunct to the long running thread on Oxford Rail's model, and just records that it is possible to take off the rather plump wheels that come with it, mount them on longer 2mm axles you may have spare, gauge to a 16.5mm back to back, and (after a fair amount of filing) things look like they should work. The filing is needed because the wheels are going on for 3mm thick. The low footplate means the top of each wheel protrudes through it, so clearance is needed between the wheel face and the footplate and as it happens also at the sides to clear the flange. The front driving wheels are almost OK when taken out to EM. The splashers have plenty of room inside but a little has to come off the sides of the opening in the footplate. The second driving axle is fine as long as all the sideplay allowed for sharp curves is taken out. There's around 2mm in spacing washers behind every driving wheel -- I have to do some trials out on the line to see what this means in practice. For the rear drivers, a lot more filing time is needed. Oxford's designers have made the water tanks solid metal (which is brilliant for adhesion weight) but the allowance for the wheels to project into them isn't wide enough for the wide wheels taken out to EM. I didn't do a brilliantly tidy job of making more space, but that is all that will need doing. It's just that it takes a while; I don't really know why the clearance is tighter on the rear drivers than on the others but that's the way it comes. As with the front wheels a little room is needed for the flanges but mostly it is the wheel face that needs more room. The axles can rock slightly so extra space must be allowed otherwise they will rub and also connect the metalwork of the footplate to one or other of the rails. In extreme cases both rails might be connected; you will soon find out as this will short out the track power. Other than that, apart from my determined efforts to ruin all the detail parts, I have done nothing except to remove the reversing lever and the condensing apparatus lever from the left hand side of the boiler moulding. And taken the lions with their unicycles off in preparation for a later-style British Railways emblem. So there are few more steps to get back to an accurate model.

Incidentally a fascinating read, highly recommended if you enjoy reading about historical engineering development, as well as about steam locos.

I've worked up first versions of the front and rear guard irons in CAD, based on a copy of the general arrangement drawing in the Eisenbahn Journal special covering the BR 86, II/94 by Manfred Weisbrod and Horst J Obermayer (this can be bought online from the publishers as a digital download, or second hand from Ebay or Abebooks). The drawings looked promising enough to try out in brass. I cut and filed them from thin brass sheet. Here are some pictures showing them fitted. They need a little straightening and centring. As I have drawn them, the guard irons don't line up with the cutouts for the front carrying wheels because Fleischmann made these up to allow the model to go around R1 radius curves. The real loco has bar frames (like North American steam locos) that run behind the top half of the wheels. Fleischmann's creativity is rather exposed by the finer flanges of the RP25 wheels fitted now. The mudguards are higher than they should be, too. I am pondering whether I can bring these down a bit. With no footplate they're a very characteristic feature of the BR86; checking sources shows they were not part of the original design and the first locos built didn't include them.

There is most definitely no protection against buffer locking. You need to be confident that anywhere one or both vehicles coupled with one or two of these go has curves that are not going to cause trouble. The recommendation is to use sprung buffers, but I have (probably through not having spent long enough shunting with these couplings) not yet had trouble on the (fairly short) vans fitted with unsprung ones. Speaking of tight curves the photo attached shows a situation I think I have only ever previously seen on a model railway. I wonder if that explains the fact there is a partly dismantled coupling lying on the ballast. This is at ÖGEG, Lokpark Ampflwang (Austria).

One thing always leads to another. I decided long ago that my H0 locos would get replacement Originalbügelkupplungen (OBK) couplings. Here after work over the last few days is the front of my Fleischmann BR 86. For sure there is a still dirty great hook but the NEM pocket is gone, it's far more subtle than anything the industry could provide and to my mind the incorporation of the scale coupling hook and turnbuckle is very neat. It's got lovely wheels made and fitted by Holger Gräler (Germany's go-to engineer for replacement H0 wheels) and I doubt any of my modifications will really live up to them. However, the OBK in the buffer beam is a massive step up from the NEM coupling that was sticking way out before. Catch is, the guard irons (Schienenraümer) were cleverly incorporated into the coupler mechanism -- they swung side to side as the coupling moved. Once exposed by removing the coupler, the whole thing looked dreadfully crude and was in the way of the OBK, so it's gone. Same at the back. And so now there is a rather glaring absence below the buffer beam. And that means I now need to create new guard irons front and rear.

As I suspected, I'm getting rather jealous of all this derring-do etc. Great stories, thanks to all :-) Sorry, questions, please forgive me: Dare I ask what was in the briefcase? Is it a diplomatic bag or the key to the dining car? Does 'OC Train' decode as 'Officer Commanding Train' and did they travel with the DR train crew in the Ludmilla? And finally: what need was there to move a trainload each of French, American, and British personnel each day -- did these trains run empty most of the time? Was it just to prove the action was possible, like some kind of international parliamentary train? Cheers Ben

Thanks for all these recollections. I guess the vast majority of foreign visitors only got to see Berlin, and that train travel wasn't a feature. I believe that 'gricing' in East Germany was also popular with Brits though, what with all those steam engines about the place. I think that focused on the area around Saalfeld, a very long way from Berlin of course and with entirely different geography. Did anyone go there, and were they too carefully watched? Photography was presumably banned as the railway had such strategic importance.

The Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989. Over in Germany they are celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of this event, obviously especially in Berlin, eg https://www.berlin.de/kultur-und-tickets/tipps/30-jahre-mauerfall/ I remember how exciting it was even to a 12-year-old, and even from a long way away. I wondered if anyone on this forum had any recollections of the time, or indeed those years just after, the exciting new dawn? The operation of trains across the German-German border was a fascinating exercise too which I am not sure I will ever be able to understand. There must be some folk with interesting photos to share.

Here's a detail of an Ade Steuerwagen for comparison of those eyes. You can also see the way Ade modelled the original seats and the luggage racks.

Modellbahn Union is offering the ESU Silberlinge for sale now. Both refurbished (epoch V and VI) and original (Epoch III) versions are listed by MU. A close-up photo is needed to see how they've handled the 'peacock eyes'. Have a look under 'picture gallery' here: http://www.esu.eu/en/products/pullman/spur-h0/n-car-silberling/ First time I have seen the distinctively shaped wheel discs reproduced on a commercial H0 model. There must be a word to describe the way they are shaped!

An entirely gratuitous photo of the front three quarter view, including quite a lot of plumbing for a British loco. Nice and weighty without traction tyres. I'm impressed by the general finish and the abundance of freestanding parts. Along with other fittings in the cab, the backhead detail has all been moulded and painted neatly and even the stripes on the boiler sight glass are painted in! From outside it's a lovely model of a nice prototype. I'm looking forward to broadening its back-to-backs to 16.5mm :-)