Looks like some of our members are going to have to build bigger layouts or get second jobs. Perhaps even a holiday may be in the offing.
Guess that's the Euro budget gone for another year.
I hadn't seen this video of that layout. There are many, and some run for a long time. They've made and continue to make improvements to it. Something else, for sure.
Wow!!!! This is amazing; and I can see my son being dragged out of there kicking and screaming well before he would be ready to leave, even if it was six hours after we would have arrived...
Reminds me of my trip to the "Verkehrshaus" in Luzern, Switzerland, where there was a scale model of the Gotthard Pass. I had the privilege of riding through the Gotthard Pass in the engine of an SBB train twice (Dankeshoen, Onkel Fritz). Seeing the model in the transport museum in Luzern, was one of the highlights of my trip to Switzerland that year - indoor highlights, that is. A trip by rail through Switzerland is a fantastic experience. North America has the distance and the spirit of the long haul; but it has nothing on the engineering wonders of the Swiss rail system...
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""If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." Rush"
It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light. - Aristotle Onassis 21 Dec 2015 08:36:29am
re: Awesome Video of Miniature Models
That's amazing! Thank you for sharing!
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"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. - Maya Angelou"
All of these locations are often modeled, and I think that the museum layout in the link Theresa provided has done or is doing some of them on the USA portion of their layout.
I agree with you whole-heartedly. There are fantastic sites in North America. Close to home is the massive viaduct just north of St. Thomas, Ontario, modeled in the local railroad museum as well. And I can't forget the Spiral Tunnel through Yoho National Park/Kicking Horse Pass... What struck me about Switzerland was just the sheer scale and frequency of everything and the way it blended into the landscape. The bridges and viaducts just seemed to grow out of the mountains, like a natural extension of the land itself. They seemed ancient to young and impressionable eyes. I've seen similar routes through the Rockies; but Switzerland was my first glance at this wonder and it therefore holds a soft spot in my heart. They amaze me to this day.
My one regret was that I never got a chance to ride in a Krokodil way back in the day.
Andrew
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""If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." Rush"
I agree with you. I have been over the St. Gotthard Pass (as it is called in Italy). We stopped at a camp site near the lake. I sat on an overpass for a good portion of the night and watched train after train go by.
An inside story: the scene of two people walking along a mountain path, entering a tunnel and then coming out of the tunnel whereupon they see a town and a lake in my novella "The Crystal Castle", is set at that locale.
The link below shows a picture (among other things) of what I wrote about:
As an ex-railway modeller I have noted the different approaches of U.S.,U.K. and European modellers. Here in the U.K. we go in for a "3-dimensional moving painting" approach where the rail element is just part of a total landscape. Detailing is global in character so that the buildings,rolling stock and scenery have equal attention to their appearence.Where possible a specific time and place is selected and the vernacular buildings, railway architecture,signalling and trackwork and any road vehicles have to fit. Locomotives, carriages and wagons and train formations have to be typical of the time and trains are run in the same sequence as reality in the case of an actual location, or appropriate in thne case of a fictional location ( where a "legend" is created before the planning is commenced) - although the timetable is "compressed".
The epitome of this is a museum in the south of England. Google "Pendon Museum" and run the video.There is much less "going on" than in the German model but it is equally impressive in a different way. I have visited this place and the video does not really do it justice. Some of the cottages and farms on this model have taken 5 years to build (each!) - and are complete with scale "tissue-paper" cabbages in the fields! All the locomotives and rolling stock have springs like the real thing. It is scale 4mm to the foot with a track guage of 18.83mm (P4 finescale), and almost everything is handbuilt.No kits or ready-to-run here ( well there are a few kits I think,but if there are they have been heavily modified).
I am not suggesting that this is "better" than any other but you cannot but admire the workmanship and attention to detail to create a total 1930s railway experience in miniature. When I saw the quality if this layout I gave up on modelling as I felt so inadequate !!
Not sure if it is still there but in Mevagissey, Cornwall back in the 1990's there was a model shop that had a railway layout with a river and boats, our boys were fascinated for ages. Seemed to take up a whole room at the rear of the shop.