rekoboy

What a life story, Bernard! Fantastic! I can just see that convertible in my mind's eye! Our kids tell us we ought to write an account - or record the spoken version - of our lives and how we got together, and what happened next. For us it seems like yesterday - but it is actually the stuff of history books, already 44 years ago. Blimey!

This thread is turning to personal historical reminiscence! Birgit and I got permission to marry at very short notice at the registry office in Berlin-Friedrichshain - and had consequently a very impromptu wedding with few guests and transport care of the Berlin underground. We had a largely weekend relationship at that stage - I was working at the university in Halle, Birgit was teaching in Berlin-Friedrichshain. My boss Erhard, now nearly 90 and a keen railway fan, arrranged my teaching timetable so that I was free on Friday afternoons and Monday mornings. Every Friday lunchtime I caught the D-Zug Meiningen-Berlin Schöneweide, was at the flat in Berlin-Friedrichshain in time to cook dinner, and every Monday morning at 5.45 caught the D-Zug Berlin-Lichtenberg-Halle-Saalfeld which was still occasionally steam-hauled by a BR01 - but mostly we had Ludmilla power. As I said before, happy memories!

Aah, yes, the British embassy on Unter den Linden in East Berlin. That's where our banns were published for the wedding - they were displayed in a glass cabinet at the entrance. More happy memories! And the staff were great. Very helpful!

The layout looks brilliant, Bernard! More photos please! Our children grew up bilingual with the Sandmann, too. We have a lot in common, I think.

Ah, good question! I use my regauged Tomix only as a vacuum cleaner with a fixed brush lightly touching the rails. If you need a polisher, then you will have to adjust the TT bogie mountings so that the track is just touched by the polisher disc. Any real pressure by the disc on the track will stall the Tomix motor and potentially cause it to fail and will also make the vehicle difficult to move. A question of experimentation, I think!

That sounds an interesting idea! Do the Hornby bogies carry the coupler pockets? If not, surgery on the bogies will be needed to allow clearance for the pockets which need to be cemented to the underside of the Tomix body. The Roco freight bogies are designed with one end open to allow space for the coupler.

The word 'Drehgestell' means 'bogie'. Do you mean the bogies you find on the Digitalzentrale website? They are the standard Tomix N ones, probably left-overs from his rebuilds. Sadly, he appears to have stopped selling the ready -made Tomix rebuilds and the bits to do the job yourself. But if you can get hold of Roco TT freight bogies it easy-ish to do the conversion - see my article

The next loco is almost finished - modified Kato chassis, Shapeways body plus elderly E German pantograph, and steps, airtanks etc from the bits box. Still some way to go. She runs beautifully and will eventually be hauling a TT standard gauge wagon or two on transporter trucks.

I had an operating session at Kirchheim for the first time in ages - rush-hour!

And safety railings for the shunter - donated by a very elderly Minitrix diesel!

Update on the electric loco. The chassis and frame are finished, the shunter's platforms have their non-slip surface (!), the shunter's steps are in place, as are the air tanks. A pair of end-handrails for the platforms are next. So much progress!

The Kleinlok (Köf) has been evicted from its shed to make room for the Motordraisine.

A simple test is to employ a TT scale figure (preferably of a tall adult) and a TT scale vehicle and check how they look in front of each building and doorway. In my experience many N scale buildings are somewhat oversized, and many structures for H0 are under-scale and suitable for TT.

Indeed it is! The 93.0 is slightly shorter and lighter than its more modern sister the 93.5.

In the late 1970s when I got together with Frau Rekoboy she was keen to introduce me to her big sister who lived in Ruhla, near Eisenach, Thuringia, in a particularly attractive part of the former GDR. My attention was seized by her address - Bahnhofstraße 27, but Frau Rekoboy soon pointed out that there had been no Bahnhof since 1967, when the branch from Wutha had closed. Nephew Thomas in Eisenach asks me often why I have never written anything about the Rühler Bimmel as the line was affectionately known - and now that Piko is bringing out the BR 93 in TT it is time to add an article. The Prussian tank locos of BR 93 (2-8-2) and 94 (0-10-0) were the usual performers on the steeply graded line which had incredibly long and well-loaded commuter trains thanks to the large numbers of workers travelling to and from the watch and clock factories and car component producers in Ruhla. By the time I first visited Ruhla the line had been long since lifted and much of the infrastructure demolished, but it was still possible to follow the route as a footpath. Wutha, the junction on the main line Bebra-Eisenach-Erfurt still exists as a much-reduced stopping point, but the only structure on the branch still standing is the intermediate station at Thal, which became a post-office and then a restaurant. My bible on the line is the book by Harald Rockstuhl, 'Die Geschichte der Ruhlaer Eisenbahn 1880-1967' and there is also a good website on the line: http://rühlerbimmel.de/ The line lives on though in some great footage on YouTube such as this...

And a memento (or two) of those trips from Hoek van Holland....

Oh, yes, and to finish my account a little more on our family trips to Köthen. On the first occasion that we used that train from Hoek van Holland we travelled through to Berlin, through West Berlin on the Stadtbahn and entered the GDR at Friedrichstraße station. Then, while studying the DR Kursbuch (all network timetable book, no, sorry, railfan's bible!) I discovered a tiny footnote on the so-called transit trains from West Germany to Berlin, that it was possible with correct paperwork to alight from such a D-Zug at the border crossing station, in our case Marienborn, and later, of course, rejoin a train in the opposite direction. As Köthen is nearer to Magdeburg and Marienborn than Berlin I persuaded Frau Rekoboy and the kids that this was an adventure and the way forward! Our alighting from the train at Marienborn was always of huge interest to the other passengers on the train who were, in any case, keen to see the menace of a GDR crossing point with its sniffer dogs and hordes of uniformed officials. We were always the only passengers to alight - not really surprising - and we were certain that people on the train were convinced we were being detained or were spies! Very amusing, though. The transit trains to Berlin stopped only briefly at Marienborn so that the travelling border officials could get on board - they stayed on the train as far as Griebnitzsee, a suburb of Potsdam, just before the West Berlin border. The border formalities for us at Marienborn were much more friendly and civilized than at Berlin-Friedrichstraße - and we had two small children who generally got a smile out of even the sternest GDR official. Marienborn is in what the GDR called 'Sperrgebiet' which was the area close to the inner-German border and for which you needed a second ID card, a so-called 'Passierschein' with which locals were issued automatically but for which visitors needed to apply - and were often refused, even for visits to close relatives. But a valid visa for the GDR in my case, or in my wife's case a GDR passport with a rather unusual permanent visa, meant we had no problem with being in Marienborn. But the strict regulations pertaining to the Sperrgebiet meant that hardly anyone needed to, or was allowed to, use the local trains that ran irregularly on the main line to Magdeburg. The DR saw this service as one of its least important and allocated the most run-down Rekowagen to it, generally hauled by a V100 diesel or occasionally a Ludmilla. We were usually virtually the only passengers on the train! Our kids after 40 years still reminisce happily about our train travel from Hoek van Holland, Marienborn and the lamentable state of the Personenzug nach Magdeburg!

Sorry, folks, I am at a loss with this set of contributions. What is the point of maintaining the presence of the topic when more than half of the pieces are missing? But I would like to add my thoughts to this topic - but concerning not the DR in West Berlin in general, but one particular train, the D-Zug Hoek van Holland - Berlin Stadtbahn of the 1980s which was the connection from the overnight ferry from Harwich and which we and our children still hold dear as it was for several years the start of our trips to the grandparents in Köthen. Just getting on to the train in Hoek van Holland with its DR rolling stock and Mitropa restaurant car was a pre-taste of our holiday - the smell of the DR disinfectant, the upholstery - and then the coffee, the beer, the Bockwurst. Happy memories. And now there are no longer trains to Hoek van Holland, just trams.

The last couple of months have seen very little modelling activity - my brother-in-law Waldemar in Erfurt has been very ill and we have been making regular visits since January - and helping to fill the tills of the P & O Hull-Rotterdam ferry! However, the Motordraisine is just about finished, although I still need to load the trailer with some tools and a concrete mixer. Most of my recent planning and thought has gone into the next electric loco for the tram network - I found a suitably cute loco body on Shapeways website, but it has taken a while to find a chassis that fits. Originally I wanted to employ two power bogies with jackshaft drive - see photo - but in the end I have had to settle on a Kato bogie tram chassis which has needed a degree of modification to fit. I think the folks at Plaza Japan rub their hands whenever they see an e-mail from me! The loco will eventually look more like an American interurban freight motor with shunter's platforms front and rear - but there is also a certain similarity to the German E44 mainline loco and to my old favourite Eggerbahn electric loco. More details will follow.

It is a lovely model and advanced for its time with its electronics. When power car and trailer are coupled together head and tail lights work on both ends - 'Lichtwechsel'. As Bernard wrote, the railcars, like most Piko products of the era are noisy in action. Your models with all of the paperwork intact would be very tempting for a Piko collector.

My latest adventure has nothing to do with European model shops but with a Japanese one, Plaza Japan, where I am a fairly regular mail-order customer. I ordered two items last Tuesday, total cost around £40, paid the eye-watering £22 for delivery by DHL - and the package arrived with no extra fees following copious SMS updates on Sunday afternoon! Just five days' transit. Top service! Note the size of the shipping box compared to the larger(!) of my two purchases!

They exist as manual and electric versions - I have a couple of the Roco H0e manual ones in the drawer. Originally, Tillig did not have their own turnout mechanism - they sold and recommended the Roco ones. The manual mechanisms look identical to the electrically operated ones - apart from lacking the three core lead.

The Tillig (or Roco H0e) surface-mount point mechanisms are a simple screw-fit to the side of the Tillig turnout or slip - they can be hand or electrically operated and are not too obtrusive.

@Les1952 - I have tried various combinations of Hunt couplings - and the best effect with my layout which includes R310mm curves on the spiral seems to be the combination of 2 medium couplings which give an acceptable gap between vehicles and no buffer-locking.

The latest experiment with Hunt couplings - a pair of Tillig 4-wheel carriages. The short Hunt couplings had the buffers almost touching, looked fabulous, but were not suitable for 310mm radius curves. The medium length couplings look and work fine.