TT-Pete

(But first, a brief intermission...)

Whereas Stockem has not yet been obliterated, Luxembourg Works most certainly has.
http://blog.cfl.lu/en/construction-worksprojets/once-upon-a-time-cfls-old-workshop

The original roundhouses and sawtooth profile of the Central Works, damaged during and rebuilt after
WWII, were the backdrop to any photo taken facing away from the station building.

Gone. Space for 3 new platforms and no doubt lashings of lucrative office/retail space.

Only one small section of the old side wall ironwork still remains for some reason.

Fortunately the classic roundhouses are unaffected and will be retained.

Saturday - morning

After an evening spent at one of my old haunts from the 80's, both as customer and as being on the wrong side of the counter, which the expatriate community knew as "pub in the Grund", the day dawns grey and cold. On the way to the Gare Centrale for taking photos of trains I call in at the Ronseal-inspired "Model Shop".  https://modelshop.lu/

Friendly and chatty, plenty of stock to browse and a good second-hand selection very sensibly priced - what's not to like? :-)

WARNING - Do not park in the multi-storey car park at Luxembourg station. A day's parking will cost 3 and 1/2 times more than the day rover ticket with unlimited travel across the country on train and bus for 24 hours.

But this unhappy revelation was still a good few happy hours in the future as I eagerly scamper along the platform, camera at the ready.

At the North end of the station the rugged sandstone cutting has been tunnelised and built over. So, in an ancient and iconic historic city and with the advances in construction and materials technology, Fuehrerbunker/Atlantikwall was the architectural style chosen?

It's still a very busy station with a lot of French/Belgian/German cross-border traffic and a few loco-hauled services, but mostly just multiple units.

The old bay platform in the background where the old GM/Nohab 1600's used to depart with Nordstreck Troisvierges/Liege services is filled in and the only sound of diesel is the faint rumble of the shunter in the adjacent yard that frustratingly doesn't come close enough to get a decent picture of.  

Anyway, time presses on and I've got a ticket to ride...

Thanks for the tip I didn’t know about cleaning the model, I just cut off the excess flash and that was it, I did rough the sides up a bit though and that seemed to help. I’ll try the two part adhesive for the next one .

Neil,

The release agent stops the parts being cast from sticking to the mould as the resin sets, leaves a faint oily/waxy sheen that then also stops glue sticking to it. I scrub with warm water and Fairy liquid and rub down. Solvents don't work so well as they can't dissolve the surface as when joining plastic, using a resin adhesive like Araldite means you are using like to stick like to like...

I've experimented with making cast resin components in the past; messy and expensive. :^)

Peter.

I did have a few issues assembling the kit as my normal plastic cement glue wasn’t sticking the bits together very well for some reason, but got there in the end. I might try a different adhesive for the next one.

Hi Neil,

It looks like a resin kit to me, did you wash the parts with detergent to get rid of any remaining mould release agent first? I also roughen the edges to be glued slightly with a bit of fine grade sandpaper and then use 2-part Araldite adhesive.

Cheers,

Peter

Friday afternoon - Luxembourg

First stop is the MBS-L emporium on the Route d'Arlon in Strassen. Huge stock on display, you name it, they've got it. Largest French and German language railway/modelling magazine titles offering I've ever seen. (Prices to match, though.) I don't know if I'm just becoming more scrooge-like in my older years, but no matter how exquisite a model it is I just can't see ever being able to justify 500 to 600 euro for an HO loco to myself. (But still manage to find myself a bargain all the same.)

Just cruising around Luxembourg city re-familiarising myself with the road layout, I decide to check out the Tram & Bus museum location. It's on my list as a vague "might go there if there's time" option for tomorrow as it's only open to the public on Thursdays and Saturdays, but still be useful to be able to find it anyway.

It was the late 80's when I last visited and the museum is still in a corner of the Hollerich bus garage/workshop site, but now in it's own purpose-built building with a short running line outside.

The gate is open and the lights are on, so I just wander in.

 "It's free admission, but we're not open." Says the chap at the ticket counter. "Are you interested in looking around our museum?" I nod. "Go on then". So I have my own private museum for the afternoon.

The main hall is very compact, the items are not so much exhibited as just parked in a garage. Not good for photography or actually seeing stuff, but very much the feel of a working collection rather than just being stuffed and mounted.

The last Luxembourg city tram line 10 to Beggen closed in 1964 and two motor driving cars and two trailers have been preserved.

I have particular fondness for the old AEC and GUY busses which I can remember being bounced around in and the crunching of the gear changes. They were taken out of service in 1977.

In 1978 myself and school chum Paul blagged a guided tour of the old Limpertsberg Tram/Bus garage and workshops by the simple expedient of going to the gate house and asking "Can we come in and have a look around please?" (amazing the places that got is in to...).

After the main workshop the foreman showed us the scrap line at the back of the garage where several of the AECs and GUYs stood awaiting scrapping. Seeing our intense interest he lent us a screwdriver and a spanner and let us unscrew as many signs, plaques and bits as we could carry. I liked the "Defense de Cracher" sign (No spitting), but my pride and joy was the GUY indian chief mascot from the front panel.

Some 15 years later I was looking for my little collection of bus bits and asked Mum if she'd seen them. "That?" she asked, "Oh that! I cleared all that junk out years ago when you left for University." Nooooooooooooooooooo...!!!  

I have always coveted the tram models... :-)

Oh look, they've still got theirs...

It would seem that the museum is more of a social club for the adjacent bus garage as just after 17:00 there's a flow of office workers and drivers through the office chatting, drinking coffee and wishing each other "Gudde Weekend - Merci, gleechfals.", so it's probably time to head off.


A very enjoyable little visit and nice when serendipity drops something into your lap that you weren't expecting.

Stockem - continued
 

The what would appear to be admin/stores, changing rooms/canteen/social club block is in a lot worse state and has obviously been adandoned a lot longer.

Creepy and very post-apocalyptic in a I am Legend/Walking Dead/Planet of the Apes kind of way...

It has been comprehensively stripped of everything, the glass in every window pane is missing - yet there is not a shard of broken glass anywhere to be seen.

It turns out that the local youth (representatives of whom who fled on my arrival) have made themselves an indoor skate park.

The upper floor is grander but much more ominous with the floor littered with large chunks of concrete fallen from the ceiling. I creep around as quietly as possible so as not to trigger anything, with one eye warily cocked upwards the whole time and get back down those stairs as quickly as possible.

I don't bother with the basement. (Good things never happen to people who go into dark ruined basements on their own in the movies...)

Adieu, Stockem. Only ghosts left here now.


I head off back towards the E411 and the last few remaining km to Luxembourg...

Road Trip - Friday

After a leisurely breakfast the first stop of the day is a diversion off the E411 to Wavre Modellisme where I save myself a couple of hundred euro;

The one item on their website that I was particularly interested in turns out to have a small, but very significant, error in the description and so (aaaargh) isn't what it is described as at all. He's got a lot of stuff, but the prices of the same larger items I bought chez Pierre yesterday are a good 20 euro more, wagons 5 to 7 euro more and even little scenic items 2 or 1 euro more.

Frankly and frustratingly there's nothing here that I cannot live without at the price that it is, so a few minutes later I am back on the road again and reflecting on salesmanship; despite having multiple openings with the website item and me asking "C'est combien?" several times, the shopkeep remains in hiding behind a display case on his counter with arms folded and offering only terse monosyllabic answers, but then this in my past experience is unfortunately not an atypical customer experience in Belgium.

A couple of hours later over the Ardennes "Autoroute de Soleil" http://wegen-routes.be/doss/ardf.html and the Stockem exit beckons, what will I find?

Turning into Rue de Neufchateau and Hooray & gawd bless excessive Belgian bureacracy :-) a beached whale hoves into view - it's still here!

And no gates, fences, keep out signs or anything. I start off by cruising around the site and apart from two baseball-capped skateboard-carrying feral youth who leg it at high speed into the bushes as I approach, the site is deserted.

That lovely expansive yard that was so chock-full of goodies - is now but a wasteland.

The shed still has two roads connected, but it's clear that nothing has been this way for quite some time.

The windows are either boarded up from the inside or so opaque that you can't see though them so I only get tantalising glimpses until I find a broken window low enough to point the camera through.

One thing that strikes me is how thoroughly the site has been cleared with hardly any clutter, rubbish or railway detritus. But hang on - what's this I spy down at the back of the shed?

Marooned forever on a truncated siding...

One last "on tip-toe arms outstretched overhead firing blindly" shot through a broken window reveals a tantalising glimpse of the interior.


Continues/...

Hello Pete,

That sounds like a truly wonderful shop!

Enjoy the rest of your trip, fact finding mission, inspiration, etc.

Bon Voyage.

Hi John,

Thanks. Yes, Pierre is definitely on my "to return to" list, as my daughter is currently in her first year at Uni in Brussels I may well get the opportunity at some point(s) over the new few years...

Peter.

Road Trip

"It's 480 miles to Luxembourg. We got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses."

Leaving home at 05:30 with a brief trip on an ocean wave...

...gets me to Brussels late afternoon in good time to visit Mini Model Rails http://www.minimodelrails.be/

The shop is run by Pierre, a genial retired Belgian Post Office fonctionnaire, more as an extension to his hobby and as the model railway club meeting room and workshop. He's got a good selection of stuff and the prices seem quite good, particularly as I am sorting through a box of -20% Promos.

"Vous voulez un cafe?" is the invitation for spending the next hour sitting in the workshop discussing model railways, SNCB trains/traction old and new, railway preservation and the general state of government, politics and 'elf n' safety Belgium vis-a-vis the UK (both equally loopy). It's only when he suddenly realises that he should have shut up shop 20 minutes ago that we tally up. If it's part of his sales technique then it's certainly sucessful, I leave having spent a bit more than I had intended, but less than I could of...

The evening is spent considering the itinerary for tomorrow, including a pilgimage to a place called "Stockem" en-route, whilst happily re-aquainting myself with quaffing draft Belgian beer.

Stockem is a large MPD and works adjacent to the Namur-Luxembourg main line and was an eagerly-awaited landmark when taking the train home, being on the outskirts of Arlon and the last stop in Belgium before the Luxembourg border. There was always an interesting selection of units, stock and locos arrayed in the large yard outside the shed and even though the train would already be slowing for the Arlon stop, it always flitted by far too quickly.

http://rail.lu/lignesbe/depotstockem.html

It closed in September 2016 with the opening of a new maintenance depot in Arlon;

http://www.belgianrail.be/fr/corporate/sous-la-loupe/nouvel-atelier-de-traction-Arlon.aspx

There had already been plans afoot since 2014 for the old Stockem site to be re-developed as a Park+Ride for cross-border commuters travelling to Luxembourg, initially quoting 10,000 parking spaces. A subsequent feasibility study reduced this to 3,000 spaces with SNCB then finally reckoning that actually 1,000 spaces would be adequate. Plans have subsequently dragged on for years, in an RTL radio interview in early 2017 the Luxembourg infrastructure minister Francois Bausch blamed excessive Belgian bureacracy (!) and a lack of communication and co-ordination between Infrabel (the infrastructure company) and SNCB (the TOC).

In an article from Summer this year I read that P+R Viville (Stockem) is scheduled for opening in December 2019 so I imagine that work will be starting (or maybe has already started) soon. The last time I was there the works had already closed and the shed was massively run-down, but still had roads connected and was being used to store electric locos awaiting disposal. I wonder what, if anything, now remains?

He was Belgian iirc

Allei une fois! Nondi jus.

By 'eck!

 

Bloomers!

Aargh. Beat me to it.

Aha, but small or large?

There was some discussion on block instruments, many many pages ago - somewhere in the 120s I think, I have a bookmark to the area which I found a couple of days ago, but I can't remember which of my computers it was on....

Yes, keeping up with CA is something of a full-time job, isn't it? I had no idea of the consequences of clicking the "Follow this topic" button;

Recommended watching is the BBC’s “Micromen”. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Simon,

Just watched it. Brilliant. Can't thank you enough for posting that.

Cheers,

Peter

Unless you constructed a Sinclair digital watch kit.  You know, the black plastic one where you had to press the case to see the time because the "calculator" style LED would otherwise suck the life out of the batteries in hours. There were many other design "features" too...  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Watch_(wristwatch)

 

After that, anything with a LCD that stayed on all the time and showed a reasonable approximation of the time would seem a pretty neat idea!

Aaaaah, Sinclair. The Best of British;

"a very sensitive integrated circuit which could be rendered useless by static shock (which, unbelievably, Sinclair had failed to allow for in its production process - meaning that many watches were DOA from the factory)"

Roco are dropping TT

Not surprised, TT wasn't really their thing, a distraction with the market tough enough as it is and their range needed investment in new models.

Piko on the other hand have released a lot of new models over the past 10 years and have expanded their TT range from almost a standing start.

JATT reappeared under the Tillig banner, so could possibly Roco models appear under Tillig or Piko?

Try this  though I have a hunch you'll be pre-disposd to disliking it.

 

"Walking as an act of insurgency"

“a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum”.

"mental models of geography"

Whereas at 16 I found geography mental, getting a D at GCE O level. 

What I find odd (worrying?) is that having grown-up in Sussex, but moved away from there in my early twenties, I still have a mental geography that is referenced to a very specific place in East Sussex ...... like some salmon that knows exactly which river to swim back up. Wherever else I am, the referencing works on the basis of "offset" from a personal grid 000 000, The Origin.

 

Assuming (for the purposes of comfort) that (a) I'm not mad, and (b) everyone else has a very strong sense of 'base reference', it makes me really feel for people who become refugees, because their sense of displacement must be more than cultural/familial, which must be terrible in itself, it must have an awfully physical sensation to it too.

Not just refugees, I can relate to this too having left the UK age 6 my "offset" is still distanced from a personal grid 000 000 (I love that concept) in Luxembourg, even though I left there for good in 1996 and no friends or family are left there, somehow inside it's still there...

When people ask me where in the UK I'm from I can't name anywhere specific, but I do tend to have a connection with wherever I am living at the time...

Level 4 Started.

 

More to follow ...

Alan, 

Looks good. What gradient are you building to?

Peter

I had asked for the Celotex and timber offcuts to be saved for me a few days ago when the job started, but its always good to get someone else who uses the same material - it confirms the stuff is as useful for modelling as it looks.

 

I have a huge pile of the stuff stacked behind the wood shed, leftovers from the construction. Hoping it won't mind being exposed to the elements over Winter as it's starting to go a bit yellow and raggedy around the edges, maybe should look at getting it under cover somewhere....

Have more timber offcuts than you can shake a stick at, probable Summer House material.

I suggest that in the technical meaning of what "steepness" means, a steep slope ends a long way before the vertical. What is steepness? It was a concept introduced when people walked, rode horses and most important had to carry goods on animal drawn sleds, pack animals and later carts. A steep hill would be one that would cause your pack animal difficulties and one that was "too steep" would be one you'd have to avoid and find a less direct route. People didn't climb cliffs very much before the ages of exploration and sport so steepness as a concept applied to a cliff is incorrect.

 

A steep hill has a path or road up/down it of around 1 in 6 to 1 in 4. Today you regularly see road sign warnings for slopes of 1 in 10 to 1 in 12. The steepest road in Britain I've encountered was a 1 in 3. For the purposes of getting from A to B that is about where steepness as a technical term ends and where "unscalable" begins.

 

Cliffs are not steep. They are cliffs. Impassable objects one takes one's herd of sheep around, not over.

 

EDIT: And the reason why Richard Dreyfuss made such a pig's ear of his railroad scenery was that he was drinking the wrong kind of beer. Obviously.

Case in point, that famous bread advert with the poor lad pushing his bike up that steep hill in Yorkshire:

Ummm,

No indeed...

 

CRdoubleheaded.jpg

Double-heading a la Belge.... (play it loud)

The Turtle Moves

I’d forgotten the temporal compromise necessary between work, domestic harmony and time spent on model railways, so progress has not been blistering.

Using re-purposed/salvaged components means things are the size that they are, not what you might have wanted to design, so putting them together has required a certain amount of time-consuming adaptation by taking things apart again to adjust/pack out/reinforce, reassembling and re-measuring.

The next set of boards being used are also reclaim, being the nascent stage of a modular 3mm TT layout left to me by a good friend a few years ago, but unfortunately not very sound  now having lain fallow in a damp garage for a couple of years. (I hope he wouldn’t mind that at least they are getting some continued use, even if not quite what he had originally intended…) Kitchen units are also still coming out of the woodshed in the garden, so correspondingly the number of boxes left to unpack is going down.

Just about everything to come out of the boxes so far has a history of it’s own, such as two half-used rolls of Brawa Schaltlitze 12v wire that still have their Giesecke price stickers, proudly stating 3,50 DM.

Giesecke being the big toy/model railway shop on HolstenStrasse in Kiel and a childhood haunt. Even though they sadly went out of business in about 1998, twenty years later their digital ghost still haunts the internet: http://spielwaren.freepage.de/giesecke/

The track is a mixture of Jouef and Roco flexi lengths and a heap of used and new Jouef electric turnouts that I’m a little dubious about. It’s salvage from Dad’s layouts over the past three decades, so not all of it is in tip tip condition… But I do remember that the Jouef points on our attic layout were the least problematic and suited the range of different manufacturer’s stock we had the best (which is not to say that they weren’t entirely without derailments…) One of my aims is to repurpose or use salvaged material on the layout as much as possible, so I’ll try them out in what will become a storage yard first and see how I get on with them.

With the events of a wet Saturday and the cancelling of mother-in-law’s birthday party synchronising, the opportunity came to try out a Traksetta template for the first time, get a few metres of test track down, wire up a controller and actually see something moving.

So NMJ Topline Models early CFL livery Nohab 1603 gets the honour of being first loco running.

And just to prove that indeed, it moves

Helmut,

Sehr schoen. Wirklich gut gelungen.

MfG,

Peter.

E2F553D7-1100-4069-BE7F-91D785DAE33E.jpeg17ADF61C-FEBC-4941-9668-7F703934BB12.png

Mustapha Leek!