Munich: Saturday Morning

We started the day with a tour of the office and then moved on for a quick visit of the Aldstadt ("old city").

St. Michael

We got to Marienplatz just in time for the noon performance of the Glockenspiel.

The line for climbing the tower of Peterskirche was so long, that we decided to skip that part. Both of us had been on the tower before, so we headed over to Viktualienmarkt for lunch at the Suppenkueche.

That's some serious selection of potato varieties.

Evening

Marienplatz

Tram near Isartor

Track measurement train

Waiting for the ICE from Stuttgart with a very important person

Arrival!

Spending the Afternoon

Mueller'sches Volksbad

After lunch I headed out of the office and spent the afternoon running errands. Along the way some sight-seeing was accomplished, too.

Near Deutsches Museum

The Patentamt was renamed to Patent und Markenamt, and they have a snazzy new sign out front,
 but I like the old name and sign better.

Modellbahncentrum near Ostbahnhof

Modellbahncentrum has an impressive (and overwhelming) selection in the store. Don't be fooled by the rather basic Web site.

Kaffee und Kuchen at Privatbaeckerei Winner near Isartor

Zug am Morgen

Ein Zug am Morgen vertreibt Kummer und Sorgen.

Löwenbräukeller

Tonight the final team dinner was at Löwenbräukeller . Everyone had a good time, food and beer was great, too.

My favorite dish this week was the Schwabenteller at Augustinerkeller, but the Wurstteller here was very enjoyable, too. Apfelstrudel for dessert certainly helped.

On the way to the hotel I stumbled by the brewery, and had to take a photo of course.

Lunch View

At lunch a co-worker referred to me as "giddy". Can't argue with that. The photo doesn't quite do the amount of activity justice. Munich is a very busy station. The amount and diversity of train traffic is staggering.

Ein Schlueckchen in Ehren ...

Spatenhaus an der Oper.

The food was very good, too.

Sunrise

Well, jetlag hit me again this morning. So I went for an early breakfast in the hotel, and then walked to Hackerbruecke for an early morning shot of Muenchen Hbf.

Fighting Jetlag

Evening

Munich Hbf from Hackerbruecke

It was late afternoon when I got to the hotel and I was hungry. Augustinerkeller is 5 minutes by from the hotel, so it was the obvious choice to go to.

Cafe Tram is in two old tram trailers serving sweet and savory crepes. I didn't have any tonight, but I'm sure I'll be back this week.

CDG - MUC

No problems at arrival and immigration in Paris. It was reasonably fast and I had more time than last time to get to the gate for my connecting flight.

At CDG they use these neat pushers that cradle the front-wheel of the plane, instead of using a metal pole hooked to the landing gear.

Arrival at Munich. Fastest time ever from seat to walking through customs, just over 5 minutes, and that included taking pictures. My suitcase was the first piece of luggage on the baggage belt.

Walking to the S-Bahn takes a while, though. To make this more fun, the S-Bahn tunnel through the city ("Stammstrecke") is closed for maintenance this weekend. No big deal: I take the S-Bahn to Hauptbahnhof, and then the tram to the hotel, instead of getting off at Hackerbruecke.

Hauptbahnhof was packed with people, and S-Bahnen.

As I walk out to Arnulfstrasse on the north side of the station, I notice that there is more construction and the tram doesn't run between Hauptbahnhof and Donnersberger Bruecke either. The bus alternate just pulled out from the stop, so I decided to follow the masses and walk, too. Not too bad. It was less than a mile, and I got some fresh air to wake me up.

SFO - CDG (yep, again)

This time the flight is leaving from gate A1. Much nicer view, and an impressive display how big an A380 really is.

10 hours later, I'm in Paris.

The first car of the airport train was empty, while all the other cars that stopped closer to the stairs were packed. I got prime seating with a view out of the front window.

SEA

Heading home and leaving the rain behind ... at least for now.

Fall Colors

Carillon Point on Lake Washington

I'm spending most of my time in a conference room today, so I stepped out for a couple minutes between rain showers for a whip of fresh air.

SJC - SEA

The City by the Bay

We took the usual route out of SJC with a loop over San Jose. The flight hung to the East, so I got take a couple photos of San Francisco, as well as see the smoke over Napa and Sonoma. The flight was event-free otherwise, and we got into Seattle on time.
 

Hello again SJC

Off to Seattle.

Making more car cards

New car cards for the Welztalbahn follow the design I laid out in January. A key part of the new design is a good photo of the car that belongs to the card. I took some of the photos on current cards  with my smart phone camera. While decent, the photos are no match for properly lighted photos taken with a DSLR.

And I'm making progress on the new paperwork for the Welztalbahn. If only I wouldn't get lost in the original paperwork all the time ...

Just for fun, I wrote out the schedule the way you'd find it in DB's Kursbuch. This arrangement looks neat, but isn't particularly practical for operational purposes.

Murrbahn in HO: First draft of upper level

[ Murrbahn posts ]

Murrbahn Upper Level. 1box=10x10cm

I continued with the plan I started last week. Gaildorf West is along the bottom edge of the room with the helix down to staging in the lower right corner. The middle of the room has the weg branch line to Untergroeningen on a pensinsula. I very intentionally only included the two end-points of that line to allow for branch line trains to run through some scenery along the way.
The main line from Gaildorf West towards Backnang runs through the Kappelestunnel and on a narrow shelf around the room with the town of Murrhardt modeled in the upper right corner.

The maximum train length I'm shooting for is 180 cm (5x 26.4m passenger carriages + locomotive), so each station should have at least one siding that fits a maximum length train, and there needs to be at least 5m distance between the first turnouts of neighboring stations to leave space for the appropriate entry signals.

I want to run operations on this layout. Passenger trains and freight trains. Through trains and local trains. Switching jobs and transfer runs. Someone has to run the trains. Fremo-style station agents ("Fahrdienstleiter") control the flow of trains through the stations. I need room for all these people, so aisle space is important and I'm trying to maintain 1m (3 ft) aisle width.

I currently have the upper level at 150cm rail-height, and the lower level at 110cm. The room entrance is a duck-under under the Gaildorf West freight yard at 140cm (~55in). That's already a compromise. Fremo modules are set at 130cm rail height and module duck-unders were manageable at module meets I've been to, so I'm hoping that 20cm more headroom works well enough for everybody. The lower level will cross the entrance on a gate or movable bridge.

Overall I'm not happy with the arrangement in this plan.

Contrary to reality, Murrhardt is set in a curve in order to fit between the wall and the helix. Major industries are Lederfabrik Schweitzer and the city gas works. Because of the curved arrangement, I needed to use several Peco and Roco 2-rail turnouts that require conversion to work with Maerklin rolling stock. Quite some effort, but feasible. Just like Gaildorf West, Murrhardt is very compressed, on top of that mirrored and flipped. The track connection to Schweitzer and the gas works is different, too, but it doesn't matter that much. At this point my version is so different, that it's at most "inspired by Murrhardt", and I'm missing several defining features of the station (e.g. the bridge over the Dentelbach and Siegelsberger Strasse).

The helix in the corner works ok for Gaildorf West, but collides badly with Murrhardt. I either need to get rid of the helix or move it somewhere else in the room. Using the peninsula might be an option, but I suspect that will be problematic with Backnang on the lower level.

I realize more and more how hard it is to create prototype-oriented track plans with the space normal model railroaders have, and this room is already a very generous space. Of course, I'm also trying to cram a lot of features into this layout. Three stations (Gaildorf West, Murrhardt, and Backnang), plus staging under the lower level, and I still want some distance between stations. At various points I have also considered including Sulzbach, Fichtenberg, or Backnang-Spinnerei, for operational variety.

Back to the drawing board...

Greenly Northern In the office

The Greenly Northern has moved back to the office and for now occupies an empty desk next to me.

Gaildorf West in HO

[ Murrbahn posts ]

At some point in the far future, I might be able to turn one of the larger rooms in the house into a model train empire. While that is still quite some time away, it doesn't stop me from thinking about how to squeeze a prototype-oriented rendition of the Murrbahn into a ~12x16ft room.

I intend to build Gaildorf West in sections. The single track ends might be built to a modular standard (e.g. Fremo Puko, or Minimax), though it is much more likely that I build this in sections tailored to my needs and available space (similar to the ideas of TOMA).

Model railroaders never have enough space. The prototype Gaildorf West station stretches 950 meters from first turnout to last. Even with a slight length compression at 1:100 that's still double the length of available room width, and I need to add the approach tracks too, reducing the available length even more. Selective compression and compressive selection are necessary tools to make this work.

The track plan retains the Kappelesbergtunnel south of the station, as well as the general arrangement of tracks, platforms, and major buildings. Due to space limitations sadly the freight yard is heavily compressed.

Quelle: Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg (PL 723 Bü 55). Published by permission. 

Gaildorf West had an unique freight yard track plan, with the former branch line of Wuerttembergische Eisenbahngesellschaft (weg) to Untergroeningen cutting through the yard tracks and past the front of the station building for many years. As much as I wanted to model this arrangement, leaving it out allowed me to dramatically reduce the required length of the station. I tried to retain as many of the other track features as possible. A section boundary could be inserted at the bottom of the two yard ladders and an additional section inserted in case I'd end up with much more room than what I'm planning for.

The track around the front of the station was removed at some point well before the 1970's and instead the branch line merged into track 1 on the south end of the station similar to the model plan.

On my Murrbahn, Gaildorf West will be the northernmost point modeled. Trains enter staging after this station via a 10 turn helix from staging under the lower level. Or maybe I keep going up and build a staging yard above the upper level.

Because my model of Gaildorf West is basically a shelf along one of the room walls, the weg line curves to the right "behind" the DB main line, instead of curving left into the Kocher valley as it does on the prototype. I will use this arrangement for the weg branch line to "disappear" behind trees and reemerge across the aisle on its way to Untergroeningen. 

I'm trying to adhere to a minimum radius of 60cm in visible sections (90cm preferred) and 42.5cm (Maerklin Normalkreis II) in hidden sections. While most European rolling stock has no issues navigating curves as tight as 36cm, of course long cars look rather terrible on such curves. The selected minimum radius for visible sections is a compromise between available space and the look of standard DB passenger cars with 26.4 meters length in a curve.

Above plan is drawn with Peco Streamline Code 100 turnouts SL-95 and SL-96 (radius 912mm, 12 degree) for main line turnouts and Maerklin K-Track "slim turnouts" (radius 902,4mm, 14.26 degree) for the freight switching area. The Peco turnouts need to be modified for Maerklin-style power pickup. I'm using Code 100 Peco track for easy mixing and matching with Maerklin K-Track.

On the Coast

At Davenport Beach near Davenport, CA

Evening Ride Home

I got out of the office a bit later than usual today. Very nice sunset.
On the Bernal Road bridge, I see a light in the distance. It's Caltrain 274, almost on time.

Tdgs-z weathered

I did a first pass to lightly weather the car on the left with PanPastels. I like the subtle weathering effect I get from using PanPastels. It jumps out only in direct comparison to the unweathered car on the right.

These cars are rather new in the 1970's, and that's the look I'm after. There will be other cars on the Welztalbahn that will get to look worn out and patched up close the end of their useful life.