rekoboy

The last couple of months have seen relatively little done to the layout as the garden and holidays have taken up most of my time. However, the goods loading area is now virtually finished with Auhagen cobbles treated with some black ink thinned with surgical spirit (great for ageing and making plastic parts less plasticky!)and I have begun to make stacks of timber from sawn-up garden twigs stuck with white glue on to bits of OHP transparency. The clear plastic cannot be seen and the stacks can easily be moved about. I am buiding a gantry crane from an Auhagen kit to assist the timber loading. The artic in the picture is a Liaz tractor unit from a Czech kit and a Klose trailer. The road down to goods area is half done, the foundation area for a signal box (Auhagen again) is complete, I have added an old goods van body for storage, and I have made a start on the left hand (west) end of the station where the final long siding is complete. There's still a lot to do. The area within the spiral to the second level is going to acquire a Werk, probably a mine, with workers' houses and a kick-back siding bridging the gradient to the upper level.

There has been a littlle more progress - the road down to the goods depot is taking shape. A you might see from the picture I love two sorts of material for model-building - foam packaging which I cut with a hot wire and foam-board which is fantastic for quick building of structures. The centre of the spiral is foam packaging with a layer of foam-board on top - there you will soon see the start of a town development, but as I want to include the terminus of a TTm tram route things could drag a little until I am sure of the exact position of the tram track.

More action at Kirchheim! The goods facilities are taking shape - the loading area is cobbled sheet by Auhagen which has been treated with a wash of black Quink ink diluted with a a good quantity of surgical spirit! It works well! My depot (Einsatzstelle Kirchheim) has just been allocated a new loco ( and Frau Rekoboy is not quite aware of its cost!!) which is the lovely BR 64 2-6-2 by Schirmer. One platform and one foot-crossing both have an undercoat - so progress is being made!

More progress! Yesterday and today I managed to add more scenic detail to the mountain at the right-hand end of Kirchheim, but the main advance was the completion of trackwork with the addition of the very nice Tillig three-way turnout which was bought last Autumn in Leipzig and which has been screaming for attention! The new turnout caused a good deal of head-scratching at first as it would just not work adequately with Roco/Fleischmann drives. A correspondent on the (German) TT-Board website advised me to carefully loosen up the pressings which link blades to tiebars - and yeaah - the turnout works perfectly. Now my scrap-merchant is to get his own siding - as you can see his loader has already driven up!

Hello Squeaky, Assembly was fairly quick. The instructions were a bit rudimentary but there were exploded diagrams, and if you have built any Auhagen or Faller or indeed Airfix building kits it will be no problem!

Hello Squeaky! I am really sorry I cannot tell you - I bought the kit in a model shop in Usti nad Labem in the Czech rep. The building kit was packed in a white box which I threw away. Sorry!

I have finally escaped from the PC in my office, school visits and the garden to conduct a little more work on Kirchheim. The platforms are now in place (Auhagen edges) and the track ballasted and the foot-crossings added. More painting and detailing may follow soon-ish! There is also a photo of my favourite loco - the Gützold BR 24 which looks absolutely fantastic!

A couple more progress photos for you - the platforms are slowly taking shape. They are made from Auhagen platform edges on a plasticard base and ends - this base is then filled with a runny mixture of Polyfilla, white glue and water. After a couple of days you have a very solid platform. The further of the two platform includes wood strips which will be drilled eventually as a firm foundation for the Auhagen canopy supports once the fill mix is dry and solid. The retaining walls are by Faller and designed for N - for which they are overscale, so perfect for TT. They are made of polystyrene with a factory-added stone veneer and can be gently bent into curved formations. In the background you can see the beginnings of a scrapyard with one of my Chinese diggers in 1:122 scale. That scene will be properly developed later.

Happy Easter! By far the cheapest way to lay decent TT track is to use Tillig's sleeper strips (Schwellenband) which is available either pre-formed in the standard track lengths and radii or a flex-strip together with their metre lengths of rail. That is the material that I am using - there are even relatively cheap turnout kits - and I have saved quite a lot. The Tillig do-it-yourself material is available, obviously, in every German model store - to get it here you can order from Conrad Electronics, a German company with an English branch. www.conrad-uk.com and http://www.conrad-uk.com/ce/en/overview/1606350/TT-Tillig-Track Their model railway pages are very good but you might need Tilli's own website - www.tillig.com - to work out product numbers

Sorry - I forgot to include this rather better aerial photo!

Rather unusually, I have managed to find some time to actually put in a couple of days solid work into the layout and now the right-hand corner of Kirchheim is almost complete - apart from a colour wash (probably very dilute Indian ink)on the Auhagen cobbled surface and the addition of a few more details. The Koef has its own shed at last! In the attached photo a BR 86 (the original BTTB model) is passing with some 6-wheel Rekos while a V 60and a Koef await their next duties.

Klose traded under the name of MiKi-Klose and was based in Altenbach, a village between Leipzig and Riesa on the main line to Dresden. His products had the reputation of being of second-rate quality and he announced models (such as BR 58 and BR 55 in TT) which never actually made it on to the market. He made copious use of Berliner TT Bahn parts in his locos. After Klose's death his moulds and tooling were taken over by the firm of Modellbau Schirmer which now markets a revised and very nice version of his BR 64 2-6-2 tank loco and his TT scale model trucks - his MAN artic tractor unit still looks fantastic although it is a good many years old. The V 60 in my photo was a source of friction between me and Herr Klose - I ordered it with a bank transfer from England and never received it even after my brother-in-law Waldemar paid him a visit and he promised to mend his ways! I got the loco eventually after 2 personal visits to Altenbach!

Here are a couple more photos from the layout. Due to work commitments - a research project in Germany - I have done little of late but as you can see the right-hand end of Kirchheim is taking shape. The tunnel mouths are from Auhagen and are thoroughly painted and weathered and the retaining wall (also weathered but unfinished) is by Faller and designed for 'N'. On the right you can see the part finished depot for my Köf (shunting tractors) whose shed is also a kit by Auhagen. The other photo shows another of my favourite locos, the Reichsbahn 106 (now 246) or V 60. That particular model is by Klose who used to be active as a producer of Kleinserien in Saxony until his death a couple of years ago. It looks cool but does not run especially well.

Hello folks! For those of you interested in European TT and have some German/Polish language skills this site will make your heart leap a little higher! The Polish gentleman who runs the site has collected and scanned every TT catalogue he could from now back to the 1960s. Utterly brilliant! http://as.rumia.edu.pl/tt/kat/katalogi.asp?firm=Till Viel Spaß!!

Here are a couple more photos showing the complete layout which employs a simple spiral for the branch up to the second level - the gradient is actually so gentle that either of my Arnold-Hornby Köf (shunting tractors) can propel the double-deck artic set or three or four goods wagons (with ModMüller metal wheelsets) to the top without slipping. Under the upper level are hidden sidings with track circuits to detect train presence or movement. The track on the lower level is almost complete - the loop on the upper section is purely temporary and is an experiment with spring points - one turnout has a Roco hand -operated mechanism, the other has a defunct Tillig solenoid drive - and in both cases the little Köf can safely pass through and open/close the sprung blades without derailing.

An academic exchange to East Germany (which became ever longer - from 1978 to 1981) made me into a huge fan of the Deutsche Reichsbahn and of TT model railways. At that point I started a collection of Berliner Bahnen material which grew steadily but was mostly to be found in a display case on the wall or in boxes as the demands of work and a growing family pushed it all on to the back-burner. Eventually a few years ago I found the time and the cash to do something about the attic - and suddenly there was space for a layout which is now in its third existence! I became rapidly dissatisfied with things with layouts one and two as I employed quite a lot of old Berliner Bahnen track - which is rubbish, to be frank. Now I use only Tillig Modellgleis which is brilliant. The turnouts have either Berliner motors mounted underfloor or surface-mounted Roco/Fleischmann mechanisms - Tillig's own are not fantastic, and the Roco N motors are a perfect fit. I got fed up after a while of mounting Berliner solenoids under the benchwork as the task rapidly turned me into the York swearing champion! Here you can see a couple of photos of my layout's progress. The BR 38 is beautiful - a new Roco product, the BR 50 is one of a Kleinserie from East Germany which cost me a fortune in 1980. My girlfriend, now my wife, thought I was totally cracked!! But she did give me a Berliner BR 86 the following Christmas!