DGO

Peco H0m track is available from Gaugemaster I bought a few bits about a month ago, the Bemo Rack is a separate part but you need to match height between rack and rail top,

Possible in H0/00 but I thing the tracks would be impossible to articulate in N

As an aside I notice that the Schinegge Platte Bahn also has its upper stations in the same style (and general Plan) as the Wengeneralp, Alpiglen and former Wengen Stations, Breitlauenen station hafway up the Schinegge Platte Bahn Schynige Platte Bahnhoff Wengeneralp Alpiglen Now if you were to look at Kleine Scheidegg you might initially think it has nothing in common, however if you look at the ticket office end i.e the actual station bit, you will notice that the upper floor has windows that don't match the floor below it and that the whole station bit is only tacked onto the rest of the building with neither walls nor roof matching. I suspect that the restaurant and Dormitory Accomodation was added after the rail line and that at some point it was decided to give the station an extra floor with a pitched roof, to help it cope with the more exposed location, I would not be surprised to find that the builders were designed and built in maybe interlaken or somewhere equally nearby and then turned into a kit of parts loaded on a couple of train wagons and put up just like a kit If anyone wants a small Diorama then any of these would be suitable, but the Schinegge Platte top station would probably make a really nice shelf layout set as it is on a narrow excavated plateau with steeply rising ground behind, dropping sharply at the front and with the single line coming in through a cutting on the left, lots of Scratch Building required but you could have both steam and electric locos in any period from just prior to WW1 to present day

I guess we should also point out that the Eiger building has changed a bit since then as well LOL

Well I saw something today that I had never realised, the original Wengen Station was pretty much a carbon copy of that at Wengeneralp There is a second picture to the right These must have been taken at some time between 1899 and 1908 since both the goods shed and the coach house are already in place Pior to this the earliest picture I had found of the station was here https://www.superstock.com/asset/switzerland-europe-canton-bern-bernese-oberland-wengen-railway-station-steam/1597-183441 I can't link the picture as it's a Superstock image However it is clearly pre eletrification, you can even see one engine taking on water, the lack of overhead cables means this is pre 1910 which is when the new line reached Wengen, the next oldest I have is This is taken prior to the kiosk being added to the station but after the founding of the Downhill Only Club which puts it between 1925 and 1932 Note the massive retaining wall on the right Next a postcard from 1939 https://www.ricardo.ch/de/a/wengen-sportzuege-bahnhof-bahn-1088411188/ Nothing much has changed This link is from somewhere between 1945 (when the new trains arrived) and 1969, I suspect it's actually from the 50's, you can zoom in up to 400% and if you do so you will note that the huge 12 foot high retaining wall is now only about 4 foot high with the hill sculpted back to let them do this. https://www.helveticarchives.ch/detail.aspx?ID=82479 Now this I think is probably the latter half of the 1970's they constructed a permanent platform surface in 1976 so it's after that Picture from https://www.geneanet.org/cartes-postales/view/6876651#0 under the creative commons licence By this point the goods shed had grown to the far end of the station and a covered staircase had been added to the downstairs toilets, this blocked off the old door into the booking office and so the adjacent window became the new door. note also that rot or damage has resulted in many of the window frames and shutters being replaced with simpler versions but one original set can still be seen on the right of the first floor. And thats it for pics, in 1989 they started to upgrade the station again, they added the shed on the valley side which handels fuel deliveries and allows the rubbish to be transfered from truck to train in modified containers to be taken to Lauterbrunnen (it used to be burnt / processed in Wengen) they added the gravel handling points at the end of what is now track 4 but used to be track 5, Then the big work started, extending the station building, creating brand new goods handling facilities with two sidings underneath the building including the ability to unload a new beer waggon, and finally adding a long canopy covering the whole of Platform 1 and providing shelter for part of platform 2, finishing in 1997. Most recently they dropped the track and raised the platform height which gives an almost level surface to access tracks 1, 2 and 3 they also widened the platforms which meant the loss of track 4 but this did allow them to increase the overhang of the canopy by about 2M Pictures of the modern (up to about 2011) Wengen station can be foud at https://www.x-rail.ch/WAB/Lauterbrunnen-Kleine Scheidegg/Wengen.htm Plus of course Google Street View I hope thats of interest - David

Odd, down to different software possibly, you could see how much of the PC resources Blender is using when you try to diisplacemnt map, every package has good and bad bits maybe Blender doesn't like large meshes, I just noticed you are using a 64 bit map, Blender reccomends using 16 or 32 Bit which would reduce at least the file size for the image

Yeah I probably run a slightly higher spec machine, 16GB of ram is a bare minimum for getting really good results with displacement mapping, 32GB is better the process is very effective but it's also a memory hog, you could try halving the resolution of the image to 2048 x 2048 or even 1024 x 1024, you loose a small amount of the fine detail but when you print at a small scale you loose that anyway By the way I'm not sure how to do it in Blender or if you can do it, but try creating your structures actual size in blender and exporting as an stl then importing the stl back in and scaling it to whatever scale you want before exporting it out for printing

I'd not count myself as an expert but am pretty experienced in 3D work and I think you covered things pretty well, a couple of things that might help: Subdivide - this takes each grid square and divides it horizontally and vertically into 2, so if you start with a 100 x 100 grid and subdivide you go, 200, 400, 800 and so on, for best results on a complicated surface like brick or stone you want a grid that gives you the same number of squares in the grid as you have pixels in the displacement map or a multiple of that, so if your image is 1024 x 768 pixels you really want at least a 1024 x 768 grid then each pixel will be assigned to one grid. The best option is to start with one grid square per pixel and then sub divide until you get a good result. Vary the amount of displacement to get different effects, in your video you were working in meters and so with the 0.1 setting for displacement you got a very dramatic up to 10cm displacement, for an old ruined wall this looks really dramatic, but you can use the same files but chance the displacement to say 0.01 and get a far more modern looking wall. The above should also work very well for creating natural looking rock faces, tree bark, wood grain and so on, but the smaller the scale the less effective the results for smaller items like bark

Also available some slightly different style motorised doors from Viesmann https://www.gaugemasterretail.com/magento/viessmann-vn5172.html (cheaper on a well known auction site) If you are a little bit creative then you can make your own for significantly less using either a slow geared motor or a servo to work them

Well technically the top station of the new lift is mostly inside the Eiger, actually I think the top station looks alright, the bottom station however .... still you can only do so much to hide a car park, what amazes me are the VIP passes, 12,000 ChF for a year, I know drinks are expensive but your going to need to make a lot of use of that lift to justify the expense.

So true, though typically most only look out the windows as the train passes throgh Wengen on it's way to Kleine Scheidegg, probably a good thing as I hear tales that those same tourists have used the area around the church in Lauterbrunnen as an open toilet :-( Then again with the new express lift from Grund up to Eigergletscher I guess a lot of people are saving some time on their hectic tours and no longer doing the Lauterbrunnen, Kleinescheidegg, Jungfraujouch then KleineScheidegg Grund route that they used to do. Back in the 80's there was a Grindelwald photographer who would get pictures of the Tourists on their way up at Kleine Scheidegg and have prints ready for them at Grindelwald when they got back, I suspect with digital cameras these days that this no longer occurs.

I wonder if different paints might be helpful, oil based and enamel paints would tend to trap any moisture behin them whilst in theory acrylics should be able to cope better being water based, maybe some sort of dehumidifier for a few hours before painting might help ?

Just as a side not the WAB has supplied Locos to both the other two 800mm lines, one of its early steam trains went to Brienz after the rack mechanism was converted, a lot of the old rolling stock of the WAB has gone to the SPB, no surprise as it's just down the line, what perhaps is surprising is that the early eletric locos from the 1910's are stil in regular use, the SPB still has a steam train which is very important twice a year, the SPB is shut during the winter an thus at the start and end of the season the catenary wire for the electric locos is put up and taken down, the work train for this task is steam powered. Sadly the WAB got rid of its last steam Loco in 1918, most of them went between 1909 and 1911 with the first WAB steam train from 1891 becoming the No.5 Loco at the Brienze Rothorn, it was in regular use there until the 1990's and is still used as one of the two first generation trains they have in operation, I say the WAB sadly got rid of their steam trains because anyone who has ever had to walk from Lauterbrunnen up to Wengen after a mud slide has taken out the catenary knows it's a long walk especially if you are not fit For a further bit of Info the WAB is the longest Rack Railway in the world

Silly question as I've just seen this and not read back, but are you using an etch type metal primer or just an ordinary metal primer ? Either way you really want to degrease the models before painting and allow them to fully air dry as well, if you degrease, dry and use an etch primer then you should not have any paint issues, If you are soldering the metal parts together I'm assuming you are already cleaning off any traces of flux, I've learned from my mistakes and these days once I start to prep a model for painting I wear nitrile or latex gloves until I put a top clearcoat on, I've left fingerprints on models before without realizing until much later, nothing worse than showing off your latest pride and joy only for a " friend " to point out your mistakes David

Cheers, I've been looking at various units for the Pantographs, can't use a standard drive unit as I'm mad enough to be having a go at recreating the Von Roll type rack rail, I found a local company that can accurately laser cut suitable thin sheet, I know we can get brass to work, but I'm also going to try nickle silver, have to be carefull with very shiny materials as it can blow the laser which is very expensive, but the cutting itself comes in at about £10 per meter, the plan is to do a what if scenario with what iff the WAB and JB had combined earlier and gone Meter Gauge the whole length, thus letting me include the awesome JB Snowblower and the lovely little He 2/2 31 or 32, I didn't think I'd be able to squeeze in the workings for the rack rail in H0e wanting the extra 3mm of space between the wheels that H0m will give me. The Layout will be a representation of the short stretch from the Tunnel below Wengwald to the Woods just above Allmend but much foreshortened

I thought I had replied earlier, the Wengernalp Bahn runs on an 800mm gauge, the Berner Oberland Bahn runs on Meter Gauge and the Jungfrau Bahn also Runs on Meter Gauge, the Schynigge Platte Bahn rons on the same 800mm Gauge as the WAB, the WAB, SPB and JB all have rach rail for their entire lengths, whilst the BOB has it for just some sections such as the climb to Lauterbrunnen, Meanwhile Interlaken Ost connects the main line routes to those of the Bernese Oberland (and many others) so you want H0e for the 800, H0m for the meter and H0 for the full size gauge. There is an odity in that the JB trains have to have their bogies swapped to get them from the valley floor via the WAB to their starting point at Kleine Scheidegg, so the WAB is large enogh to take Meter Gauge, I can only presume that by the time the JB bought out the WAB, BOB and SPB that it was considered too expensive to move to the slightly larger gauge.

Is that a SOMMERFELDT Pantograph on the WAB Shunter or someone elses ?

I'm not sure that there are typical platforms or goods sheds in Switzerland, just about every station I've been to over there is different, modern stations do have certain common details such as the texture tiles at the edge of the platforms, but often details will depend on where in Switzerland your station is located and what period you are trying to represent, if it's a mainline station in a town, chances are that the platforms will have canopies, but a small station might only have some sort of shelter by the station building itself and those buildings can likewise vary hugely. If you want modern Swiss your platform will need the automatic ticket validating machines and probably the ticket machines as well, along with the typical train timetables on boards showing arrivals and departures, with modern platforms having been raised in recent years for ease of access for the disabled, older period platforms were frequently little more than tarmacked areas just about level with the top of the rails which could be recreated as if making a pavement, most stations are kept clean these days certainly since the 1980's but I recall them being slightly grubbier in the 70's as were the trains themselves, don't forget the Swiss Clocks so the passengers can see that all is running exactly on schedule.

I think what makes it more complicate is that the central roof section is I believe a steeper pitch than the rest, I think 30-35 degrees for the other roof sections but the central tower is probably 40 - 45 degrees, even then there are other bits of roof that appear to be even shallower, tis a , but you certainly have the look and its clearly recogniseable for the building, a lot more skill than luck getting as close to it as you have

I may be wrong but to me the roof looks just a little too steep, not by much though, other than that it's beautiful, the detailing you have achieved is excellent.

Re your DHL messages, We're sorry but we do not appear to have received your consignment from the sender. is the usual message you get if they turn up to collect a bunch of packages from the sender and not all of them were ready for pickup. Another one is something like "your package arrived late and will go out on the next shipment" which usually means it arrived too late at the local hub to go out on todays courier list, but it might actually still arrive today, as sometimes they send out a second van to meet up with the local delivery guy part way round his route ... Still could be worse before DHL we used to use Parcelforce, it's fine in the UK but in Europe they use a right bunch of idiots, one very expensive parcel went missing and another got run over by the couriers truck, you could see tyremarks on the box !

You could use Fusion 360 to model everything, and then 3d print which a lot of people do, there are some very good videos on youtube on the channel "3D Drawing for Model Railways" https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO6U0E0fVTEm9RUQMRtKVKQ he's done several different projects including an impressive crane

An important thing is to know about the laser that will be doing the cutting, it's well worth getting a few squares and circles cut (just a few cm in size is fine) this will show how accurate the cut is, a laser beam has a kerf (width of the cut) some systems automatically adjust for the cut width but many don't to get accurate fitting you need to know this.

If the pdfs are direct from a drawing program you can import them straight into Autocad with the pdf import function, some train manufacturers provide line drawings in their pdf brochures that can be imported this way, if you happen to know a few key dimensions of the real thing this becomes really useful for modern stuff

When I was at school I took 'O' Level technical drawing, we used 2H and 4H Pencils, rulers, compasses, set squares, T squares and drawing boards, over time I upgraded from the T Square to a parallel motion drawing board, then onto CAD first in 2D then in 3D, they are just tools, but they do offer huge advantages over earlier techniques, for instance I can create complex assemblies in 3D and make sure everything fits exactly how it is supposed to, Or I can spin a part round to see it from any side at any angle, but going back to the original question, I'd say rendered CAD images are not a model railway, but depending on the setup they might be a simulation of a model railway .. David