Lunch

This is it.

Time for my flight home. Can't wait. It was really nice spending time with family the last few days, but I'm ready to go home. Two and half weeks is a long time to be away.

Here's a shot from our weekend walk at Monrepos.

The photo quality of my cell phone doesn't even pretend to be near what Tatjana's camera produces. 

Morning Fog at School

It was very nice fog this morning. And even thicker when Tatjana went to school.

Important Literature

Photo credit: Tatjana

Tiersteintunnel

On the way from Zurich to Stuttgart as usual I was watching the scenery outside the windows of IC184. Between Rottweil and Horb the track tunnels through several hills along river Neckar, and to my utter surprise at one of the tunnel portals I read the sign "Tierstein-Tunnel".

I later looked up the Gaeubahn on Wikipedia, and indeed there is a "Tierstein-Tunnel", followed by "Hohenstein-Tunnel", whose name is awfully close to my "Hochwald-Tunnel".  It's amazing how sometimes completely made-up names can be found in reality, not that far away from where I imagined they could be located in my model.

rottweil.net has a few very nice photos of the tunnel portal that in an instant had me wide awake on Friday afternoon.

"Critical" Supplies

A visit at Zuri-Tech yielded a nice set of second-hand Maerklin D-Zug-Wagen. While they are compressed in length, the cars will look reasonably ok on the fairly tight radi used on the Welztalbahn. This gives me the material to model a detoured long-distance D-Zug during operations, and they just look good for an Open House setup.

I also couldn't resist the siren call of a Roco Rungenwagen, and some figures to populate the farmers market in the town of Emsingen. All of the items were on sale so the damage to my wallet wasn't too horrible.

She Arrived

Fun at Zurich HB

Emsingen station interior, part 4

And you thought I would let you off easy, did you ... ?

Just as I suspected, when I put a light bulb inside the station building and turned off the work bench lights, the building walls started to glow:

Yeah, that's really not cool. This is not a scene from a ghost story. The wall on the left got some thick sheet styrene on the inside, which helps, but isn't perfect. The wall on right is not fixed yet, neither is the door. 

The baggage / express freight room after installing a screen of black construction paper inside, which then gets covered up with a thin sheet of white styrene.

The station office.

And the fixed waiting room. The doors are impossible to fix properly at this stage. Before installation I should have painted them black on the inside to reduce the sheen. The wall on the right is covered with construction paper, the one on the left with just sheet styrene. Paper wins.

The last three photos are exposed for 3 secs with 5.6 aperture. I used an LED flash light to briefly light up the walls and simulate some moonlight. No digital editing done.

Busy time in Emsingen

The transfer run from Emsingen to Talheim is extra long today. The Talheim switcher will have some work to do...

Emsingen station interior, part 3

It's done.

Station office and baggage / express department

Waiting room now with passengers

Tonight I built the luggage department. The shelves are made from styrene, and the boxes / bags are cut from some balsa wood strip. Putting it together isn't really that hard, but it took forever.

I updated the waiting room with the arrival and departure information (thanks for the idea, Wolfram), as well as waiting passengers. This is the first time that I painted figures this small myself. The paint looks appropriately clumsy. However, when they are behind glass inside the building you can't quite see all my mistakes, so it's acceptable. I'll get some more practice when I paint the remaining 40 sitting passengers in the package...

The rooms are now permanently installed in the station building, the light mask is adjusted and cut out ... and I have this nagging feeling that I'm not done with this topic yet.

Emsingen station interior, part 2

I was encouraged by the success of the waiting room, and continued to build rooms behind the track-facing window front. Next up was the station office, which also houses the ticket counter.

Hey, look! There are papers and folders on the desk.

What I found interesting is that it doesn't take much details to suggest a room behind the windows.  I'm likely going to add a Preiserlein somewhere in the office to make it look more "lived in".

Now I only have the express shipment and luggage department left to do before I can return to the regular construction of the station building.

I'll leave the top of the rooms open, and place the bulbs for general building lighting high enough, so that they illuminate the decorated interior spaces as well.

The bird has landed

Emsingen station interior

When I got to the step to install the interior paper mask of the Emsingen station building, I realized that all the first floor windows have "closed" grey curtains. Urgh. Not how I envisioned this. Over the last couple days I looked at dozens of floor plans of station buildings from around the late 1900's. Baden-Wuerttemberg's Staatsarchiv in Ludwigsburg is a treasure trove of such plans. A surprising number of plans is available on their Web site. While the navigation is sub-optimal, the information is awesome. 

Anyways, I learned that most small to medium stations typically have the following rooms on the ground floor level:

- Eingangs-/Schalterhalle (entry hall, ticket counter)

- Warteraum (waiting room, sometimes separate rooms for passengers travelling 1st or 2nd class)

- Gepa (Gepaeckaufgabe, i.e. luggage services)

- Dienstraum / Fahrdienstleiter, Stationsbuero (official railroad business rooms, typically the ticket counter would be on the wall between this room and the entry hall)

- Toiletten (rest rooms)

Depending on the building passengers access the platform through the waiting room, or a hallway from the entry hall.

Tonight I decided to try and build a waiting room.

The walls and floor are made from sheet styrene. The benches are survivors from my Dad's layout, as is the sign. The door in the corner is left-over from another kit. The floor is painted. I intentionally left the brush marks to make it look a bit more used. I added the vertical "wood beams" to give the walls a bit more structure.

The waiting room is in the left corner of the station building facing the operators. If I go through all this trouble at least I want to be able to see it, too.

View from the outside. It's subtle for now, though I think it'll look really nice once I add interior lighting, and add a few waiting passengers. By the way, this is the wall that was missing in the Testing pictures from last week.

Time to think about how to arrange the Dienstraum and Gepa.

Testing, testing, testing

Mockup placement of the main station building in Emsingen, now that I have most of the major wall sections built.

Oh yeah! This is working nicely. The station building has a more commanding presence than the stand-in I used so far. It visually pushes back the city a bit and helps to create the forced perspective effect I was hoping for. The city uses 1:87, and 1:100 buildings. I'll continue adding 1:87 along the left side of the city. Overall, the scene becomes much more balanced now. I'm excited!

Emsingen station building started

I started work on the station building for Emsingen.

This is Faller 110114 "Trossingen". Faller wants you to build the main station with the freight shed attached, but thankfully they provided a window front (the 5 ground floor windows in the photo) if you choose not to do so.

The freight shed is neat, but too small. I'm planning to kit-bash it and double its size utilizing as many wall sections as I can from the kit. I'll probably build the missing wall sections from Evergreen wood panels similar to the paneling under the roof line of the main building.

Busy Kids

Saws are awesome tools for making things.

Walking on Water

You can have a lot of fun by mixing water with corn starch. ... Especially if you scale it up and fill a 2 foot deep trench with that stuff.

Dorfschmiede done

Alte Dorfschmiede in the perspective as it will be seen by most people visiting the layout.

Today I finished up the blacksmith house (Dorfschmiede), including some weathering and installation of lights. As usual I used Pollyscale paints and Bragdon powders to give the house a bit of personality and help with removing plastic sheen and weathering.

After some more consideration, I didn't install additional outside lights, since there will be street lights around the house. I also realized that the miniature lights I do have are either oversized, or their shape looks funny on a house like this.

The work shop with the big hammer is visible.

The lighting arrangement in this kit creates some really nice effect with the open shop doors.
 

At night

The "rear" of the house (well, really it's the front door...) is rather bland and will face towards the market square. I do need to spend a little bit more effort on hiding the gap above the front door, while keeping the upper part of the house removable for maintenance.

More experiments in Emsingen town

Last night I continued working on Faller's "Dorfschmiede" (1903961, black smith). The kit is a bit fidgety, and has more small parts than I expected. Some filing, filling, pushing and shoving is needed to make everything fit neatly, though the parts fit much better than Vollmer's "Alte Feuerwehrwache". Can't really blame them. There are 20 years or so between those two kits.

Either way, at the end of the evening I put the half-finished building into the town arrangement for Emsingen. Works quite nicely.

Here's an overview shot. The town of Emsingen develops to the left. The old city center is in the middle of the photo. I'm planning to add a market square with a small fountain in front of the city call. With some selective compression, to the right the town peters out towards the forest. I may, or may not, keep the bungalow on the far right. Some rich guy plastered his family home on the edge of town ... or, I'll put a small barn and/or an apple orchard there instead.

On to finishing up the black smith house ...