Schinkendorf. A small German H0 Layout

I visited one of my favourite model shops, Jane's Trains of Tooting, on Wednesday and was delighted to find a used Roco control trailer in the very attractive DB Turquoise livery, for a moderate price. I'd been looking for a control trailer to use on Schinkendorf for a while as it makes an ideal substitute for the staple railbus set. While it seems to have been unusual to run a control trailer solo, I have seen photos where it's occurred...that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it! http://www.janestrains.co.uk/ 

Following on from the last post about Nachlösewagen, a bit of a look at some coaches, these can be used in the absence of the railbus set or at busier times: First up is a 2nd/baggage Bogie Umbauwagen, this is the vehicle featured in the last post... This is probably the most typical branch line vehicle I have so far, there's also a 1st/2nd, the only snag being that a 2-car train won't fit in the loop for the loco to run round... Both consists are hauled by the Piko Hobby 218, though motive power could equally be a 211/2, 260 or 290, possibly even a 333. Next up, something less likely...a Roco main line 2nd coach, picked up for a fiver at the Knowl Hill show. Motive power this time is the 333, and we're a few years further on, in the mid-1990s. As the Umbauwagen are no longer in service and the railbuses are getting very long in the tooth, there's a bit of a stock shortage, so this rather unsuitable vehicle has been pressed into service... Not totally out of the questio...

So what's that? When I bought my Roco 798/998 railbus set, I noticed a blue placard in one of the windows, with the words "Nachlösewagen-Fahrkartenverkauf". Google translate didn't really give a satisfactory answer, although I guessed that it related to ticket sales from the second word. An enquiry on RMWeb got a most useful response from several fellow members, to the effect that they were used on lines with unstaffed stations without ticket issuing facilities, this meant that you could board the coach, then buy your ticket without having to pay extra; this, of course, is ideal for Schinkendorf. I recently bought a couple of bogie Umbauwagen, with one came a transfer sheet with destination boards to fit to the moulded boards on the coach sides, among which were a pair of Nachlösewagen-Fahrkartenverkauf boards so I duly applied these to the boards on the 2nd/baggage car, so this will be an appropriate substitute for the railbus set, as well as providing extra cycle ac...

I've been looking at prototype photos again, always a dangerous thing! Among others was a photo of Obing Station in Bavaria, which shows the yard and areas around the track to have been a lot lighter than I'd originally finished it.  There were also a few areas that had picked up a bit of staining, no idea where from but it looked pretty pants. So...a quick trip to Hobbycraft yielded some acrylic paints, Concrete and Mouse Grey were mixed to give a good base colour, this was then brushed over with several shades of weathering powders. I also added some fencing, along the back of the yard there's now a section of rustic wooden fencing which gives way to decidedly non-rustic Armco-style barrier. I wasn't happy with the greenery, too much in some places (the trees were hiding much of the station so were reduced), not enough in others (contemporary prototype photos show a lot of grass, weeds, etc. so more was added in likely places.  Following all this, it was time to clean...

It took a couple of sessions of glueing on Juweela beets to the load I'd made for the blue MB tipper. This evening, I added wing mirrors and a pair of Amber rotating beacons to the cab, and painted the number plate white. Having done that, I fitted the load to the lorry to see how it looked...nearly there, I think.  I need to adjust the tip angle slightly, and weather the lorry, lightly as it would be nearly new.

This popped up on my YouTube feed today: It's very useful to me as a reference for Schinkendorf, as it shows factory workers and their environment at around the time the layout is set, both in East and West Berlin.  While most of the workers in the East Berlin factory are wearing blue overalls, some wear ordinary work clothes, there's little in the way of modern Personal Protection Equipment (I suspect the one chap wearing a safety helmet may be a supervisor or similar) which pretty much affirms my choice of attire for the workers at Schinkendorf's small factory.  How much visible difference there would have been between them and their contemporaries in the West, (I suspect the red overalls in the "West" footage are a Siemens thing) I don't know, though I suspect they'd have looked fairly similar...this is just as well, as Schinkendorf is primarily a DB layout! Actually, having looked through the video, it seems that I could probably get away with running ...