Detailing SVL 68165 (2)

What do you do on a Sunday afternoon? I spent it watching a cab view video on Youtube. 2 hours from Offenburg in the Rhine Valley following the Black Forest Railway ("Schwarzwaldbahn") via Hausach, Triberg, Villingen-Schwenningen, and Singen to Konstanz on Lake Constance. In my version of reality, the Welztalbahn connects to the Schwarzwaldbahn in Hausach.
I have also traveled the segment between Immendingen and Singen many times when taking the Intercity between Stuttgart and Zurich. One of the new IC2 sets is visible in the video.

It's nice to watch the video and know the area well enough that I can identify the train location in the loops between Hausach and Triberg, or recognize the meadow near St. Georgen where I stopped with my Dad to take photos as inspiration for the Welztalbahn.

While watching the video, I continued to work on replacing the grab irons for SVL 68156. They are certainly not perfect, and I realize I picked a pretty difficult and annoying car to work on, but since I started this, I gotta finish it. After I was done with the one end of the car, ...

 ... I started working on the other end.

Phew. I was tired by the time I got to the last rung on the long side of the car and didn't notice how crooked it was until after the CA had dried hard.

Detailing SVL 68165

After the successful build of a Bowser wood hopper car, which is now waiting for weathering, I'm stepping up the challenge with the second car in the series: Replace the molded on grabirons and stirrup steps with detail parts from A-Line and Tichy. I already removed the CNW lettering and heralds and will replace them with Silicon Valley Lines lettering like the previous car after a coat of paint.

Gbkl 238 (ex. Glr 22) - Maerklin 46163

Another addition to the freight car fleet on the Welztalbahn is Maerklin's new rendition of a Dresden Glr in Epoch IV as type Gbkl 238. Comparing the car to the drawings in Stefan Carstens' Gueterwagen book series ("Gedeckte Wagen, Band 1") shows that Maerklin did a pretty good job to capture the prototype. Not many of these cars survived into the 1970's, since their parts were used as basis for a rebuild program into type Glmms 61 and Gltmms 62 in the early 60's. Thus, this car will remain the only one of its kind on the Welztalbahn. This should be a fun weathering exercise at some point in the future, since by the time the layout is set in, the car should look fairly shabby ...

Since I have reached the maximum number of cars that this layout can reasonably handle, I will need to decide which other cars will be replaced by the new additions and taken out of service for now.

Checking out the competition

You may have noticed that I like trains and railroads. Nevertheless, as a transportation engineer I appreciate cars, too, and thus we made our way today to the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart-Untertuerkheim.

Let's start off with a model that most visitors to the museum won't even notice. There's a series of display cases that show state of the art transportation before the advent of the automobile.

Model of river transportation in the 19th century. The Neckar at Esslingen stone bridge. Chain ships transport barges up the river by pulling on a chain that's installed on the river bottom over a distance of 130km.

The museum spans the history of Mercedes Benz cars, trucks, and busses from early times to recently.

A period car. I especially like the shadow effect along the back wall.

The oldest surviving Mercedes.

I really enjoyed the displays in the sports cars section.

Oh yeah, I'd like this one please.

A 300 SL Coupe. Nice.