rekoboy

It is the bogie drive-train system that Tillig first employed in the so-called Taigatrommel, the Lugansk-built Reichsbahn V200, or BR 120.

It is difficult to find an exact match for the DR's orange livery for on-track plant and transport. I think this Vallejo acrylic paint gives a reasonable faded version of the colour! Still lots to do!

But as I pointed out in an earlier post Hornby would have been crazy to perpetuate model railways in TT 1:100 when the market for TT in Europe and N America is centered entirely on 1:120.

Eldomtom mentioned material for wargamers. Some of you might have encountered the Russian manufacturer of wargame products Zvezda - whose products may well have disappeared from UK shelves by now, but used to be stocked by my local model shop. They produce in around 1:100 scale(?) lots of packs of soldiers, planes, tanks, and, most importantly, military trucks which can be easily made civilian! I have in my 'to-do-pile' three or four Zvezda truck kits, including an AEC Matador, no less! I have built a couple of wartime Opel Blitz trucks, which were still around in the early seventies in E Germany as coal lorries or on farms. The kits are very simple and have no see-through windows - a soft black pencil will do a good job of simulating glass, especially if the model is more in the background. My Blitz are modified with my own version of a flat-bed body.

Auhagen produces the signal box in in H0, TT and N. Here is the page from their huge catalogue, which is also packed with modelling hints and tips... https://www.auhagen-shop.de/product_info.php?info=p193_stellwerk.html

The signal box is by Auhagen.

As I commented a while ago in one of my German Railways section posts, Peco's N gauge accessories are sometimes clearly over-scale and thus perfectly suited to TT 1:120. As you can see from the photos which include true-to-scale TT 1:120 vehicles and people (and yes, a Trabant is so small in reality) the Peco cable drums and pallets, especially the pallets, are perfect for TT 1:120. I wind micro-cable round the open cable drums and they look a lot better for it, especially when treated with some paint, too.

My order of N scale Dapol knuckle couplings has arrived - and I am impressed. Not only do they look better - somewhat less obtrusive than the Profi-Kupplungen - but they also work perfectly and do not disengage in action. I carried out some speedy test runs around the layout and over pointwork with the Motordraisine and trailer - and they stayed together.

It is the same pocket for N, TT and H0e/009. Roco's TT locos and freight vehicles are supplied with Fleischmann Profi N scale couplings as standard, not TT ones, so unless you have only Roco rolling stock on your TT layout a coupling change is needed. I am experimenting with left-over Profi couplings on my track maintenance vehicles and in semi-permanently coupled sets of carriages. They are quite complex but very robust - and unlike Tillig or Kühn couplings you can simply lift a vehicle out of a train without disturbing or derailing the adjacent vehicles.

Little has happened of late on the modelling front as Frau Rekoboy and I have been in Erfurt visiting her brother who is very ill. However, work has now started again on the Motordraisine. The trailer is largely finished apart from painting and now has NEM coupler pockets, adapted from PEHO parts. The Motordraisine chassis has been modified again to raise the body slightly to accommodate the coupler pockets and to enhance the overall appearance. The chassis has acquired a lead bar (laminated from some roofer's lead flashing material), which may well need to be doubled in size to ensure that there is equal load on both axles, and I have fiddled around with the pickups so that there is a slight degree of springing to the wheelsets. At present I am testing the vehicles with N scale Fleischmann Profi couplings which are a bit too rigid with the fixed pockets - so I have ordered some Dapol couplings to try out. The Draisine and trailer run very well.

And here is the mixture of kit-built and home-created buildings in situ - with still a lot to do! A friend asked why he had to crane his neck to look at the row of shops on the left, and why the backs are much easier to see. There's a simple answer - what do you see more from passing trains? Correct - the backs of buildings.

Thank you, jmh67, for the kind words. It is great to be able to inspire a colleague! Dead straight streets on model railway with neatly lined-up buildings are another of my pet dislikes! Yes, the post-office sign was a bit low - a couple of my Preiser people were complaining, too! It has been moved up a bit. I agree that the sign might be unlikely in a small town, but I want to make it clear to observers that it is 'Die Post'. The sign was made from one of my own photos, taken before the Wall fell in Berlin-Friedrichshain, round the corner from where my wife lived. All of my signs are made on my PC from original photos or using MS Word and printed in high quality on photo paper.

Pola (who manufactured for Playcraft) supplied cute paper sheets of curtains and decorations with every building, along with a sheet of railway-oriented posters. A chance encounter with unmade Pola kits of the 1960s in a second-hand shop in Eastwood, Notts, led me to start collecting them (you can hear Frau Rekoboy moaning and groaning in the background!) - a couple I am keeping as nice mementos of the period, the others are being gradually used up for building parts. The curtains, especially if used with home-made or Viessmann light-boxes are great - there is nothing that I dislike more than light shining through walls or light shining from under outside walls! There are always bits left over from Auhagen kits - and indeed you can buy bags of building parts from that company in most German model shops - so I employ a mixture of Auhagen and Pola parts in my scratch-building projects, where my own photos are used for interiors, too. Note the mini-market, the book shop, the butcher's and the bar - where Pola papers are used, too! The butcher's shop is purely Auhagen, the bookshop and the bar were built with Pola and Auhagen components (roofs and windows and doors) and poly sheet, and the mini-market is largely Auhagen. The post-office is scratch-built with the help of Pola and Auhagen and own photos, the next-door building is entirely out of the box

The best source of original Arnold and Hornby-Arnold spares that I have encountered is this website - www.arnold-ersatzteile.de If you follow the link you will see on the left-hand column 'Arnold ET früher' for original Arnold parts, then 'Arnold ET heute' for Hornby-Arnold. If you click on those words they will expand downwards into a list of HN...product numbers. Click on one of those and on the right you will see a list of BLUE product numbers from which you can call up an exploded diagram of each (!) Arnold model plus parts list and download it as a PDF! Highly recommended!

I think that many thousands of TT 1:120 modellers - me included - might be affronted to hear that the products which we buy and the work that we produce is bodging!

More progress has been made on the ÖBB-Motordraisine, the track maintenance team's vehicle. The Shapeways bodyshell fits the chassis perfectly - but it is too low, and also needs a running board and rudimentary buffer beams plus a trailer coupling. So more work is needed - but I know exactly what I have to do! The real progress has been made on the trailer. I mentioned earlier a whitemetal body kit for the trailer - this turned out to be a non-starter in terms of weight and crude detail. While my family was watching wall-to wall rubbish on the TV during the Christmas period my mind was constantly occupied with finding a solution to the trailer problem. The answer came when I looked at a Peco N-scale goods wagon chassis which I had bought for a further vehicle for my tramway maintenance train. Bingo! That was the answer. Regauge a Peco chassis and it would be the perfect size for a trailer for the Motordraisine. The chassis was carefully sawn lengthwise and then widened with approx. 4mm broad Evergreen profile which matched the thickness of the chassis moulding. On top was glued a piece of 2mm poly sheet as strengthening and as the trailer floor. The 7mm diameter wheels and the axles are for TT, of course, by Modmüller, and are a perfect fit. There is still a lot to do, but my Draisinenprojekt is well on the way.

On the other hand, Hornby's strategy, rather than a random short-term whim, might just be the result of some thorough market research, some careful observation of the home and European markets and a good deal of thought as to how to engage new converts to railway modelling. In my eyes a British company has done something innovative for a change, and I wish Hornby the best of success in this endeavour. But what strikes me as a member of both the UK and German railway fraternities is how many enthusiasts(?) cannot see the ointment or the soup for the vast number of annoying flies!

I mentioned just now in a post the success Hornby appears to be enjoying in Germany. If they had stuck with the British TT3 format of 1:100 or attempted the introduction of a fine-scale gauge unknown to most modellers they would have killed any export possibilities stone dead. 1:120 means an export market across the whole of Central Europe and to an extent the USA. Hornby needs a return on its investment and profits - that does not happen by appealing to a small coterie of inward or backward looking purists.

I would like to pick up Dunsignalling's comment that other (European) manufacturers would not have the financial resources nor the initiative to enter the British TT 1:120 market - but TT 1:120, while a significantly smaller market than H0, is not by any means a niche area, and the big hitters such as PIKO and Roco have entered the TT market with purpose and enthusiasm, PIKO especially, because there is quite simply profit to be made. If Dr Wilfer, the very enterprising boss of PIKO, sees a possibility for a profitable entry into the UK TT 1:120 market then it will happen - of that you can be certain.

Hornby has already made a very sound impression in Germany, the homeland, you might say, of modern TT 1:120 - there are numerous comments and first test reports on the TT-Board forum, and the overall opinion seems to be very positive, indeed, although there are some negative comments on quality control at Uncle Wu's Hornby plant! German TT fans are particularly impressed by the generally finescale appearance of Scotsman and the Pullmans - they see the overall finish as equal to other mainstream manufacturers - but at an astonishingly keen price. Numerous TT-Boarders (including me) have orders with Hornby although we are generally not modellers of the UK scene! It is always possible to find an excuse why an LNER Pacific is at work on a German main line! Hornby's thrust into the German market has awoken a huge amount of interest in British railways, especially the LNER, among TT-Boarders, and I have already been asked to write pieces for that forum on Sir Nigel Gresley and his locos. For German speakers here is the link....https://www.tt-board.de/forum/threads/Hornby-tt-120.63983/

Some of you may have read my contribution on the theme of Tomix N-scale motorized track-cleaning vehicles on the German Railways section of RM Web - but since those photos were lost from the site and since I have made one or two changes, here we go again. The machine in question is available in the UK, mine were bought direct from Japan from Plaza Japan, whose prices are generally very low - but whose postage charges are quite steep. On the German TT-Board site there has been a lot of discussion about the re-gauging to TT of the very over-scale N-gauge Tomix track vacuum cleaner and polisher - indeed one contributor sells professionally rebuilt Tomix machines through his website (www.digitalzentrale.de). The discussion centred around the pros and cons of using bogies or chassis parts with power-pickups as in the original Tomix design. The Tomix track-cleaner has a powered rotating brush, which can be easily replaced with a supplied fan to make a vacuum cleaner, along with a fixed track brush and an onboard tank for cleaning fluid. As in the case of other colleagues from TT-Board I decided not to add power pick-ups to TT freight bogies (in my case from Roco) but to power the machine by jumper connection from a semi-permanently coupled loco. After experiments with a Piko Taurus and a Zeuke V180, which were not especially successful thanks to the weight of the track cleaner which has some meaty zinc blocks inside it, I settled on a BTTB Ludmilla which had been an unplanned acquisition in a job-lot from E-Bay. As you can see from the attached photos the original bogies with pick-ups and N couplers were removed and replaced by Roco bogies which were modified with a distance ring made from poly tube. The original self-tapping screws were re-used. Peho coupler mounts were glued on to both ends of the machine and a small hole for the jumper cables drilled carefully in one end of the body shell. Those jumper leads were then soldered inside the Tomix to the original connections to the now removed bogie pick-ups, and were then cut to the correct length and soldered on their other ends to home-made copper plugs - ex mains-cable earth wire - which fit the sockets made of brass tube under the cab windscreen on one end of the Ludmilla. Inside the Ludmilla the brass sockets are simply wired to - and soldered to - the motor leads. To anyone who is sceptical and believes such a machine to be a gimmicky toy my answer is - try it and be amazed! On its first full test-runs round my layout I was amazed how much fluff, dust and loose ballast was vacuumed up. Before most operating sessions I run the Tomix in a cleaning train which also contains one or two Tillig freight wagons with Noch cleaning pads attached. Problems? Not really, apart from the fact that the plastic employed by Roco for the freight bogies is resistant to most adhesives - Araldite worked in the end.

Yes, those are the correct parts and part numbers

The coupler box needs to be removed with a Dremel attachment and/or a chisel craftknife blade and the chassis carefully smoothed - no problem for an experienced modeller, but maybe quite difficult for a novice.

I use Peho conversion kits - they work well, but can involve a large amount on surgery on the vehicle in question, especially on BTTB passenger carriages. Their use is not without problems for the inexperienced modeller. I shall add a section on Peho close-coupler mounts in the near future. The simplest solution for modellers who have older BTTB or Tillig coupler mounts (with the spring loaded slot) is to buy a pack of modern Tillig or Kuehn couplings for the slot fixing, i.e not those for the NEM pocket ones. That solution is quick, easy and results in no alteration or unwanted damage!

Just for a change, an English loco! Have a lovely Christmas, folks, and a happy, healthy and peaceful New Year.