Sunday, December 07, 2014

Dream winter layout?

 
One of the benefits of belonging to a model railway club is that the library contains books you'd probably never buy yourself. One such is "Ideenreiche Modellbahn-Anlagen" by Ivo Cordes.

Basically, this is a German plans book for model railways. As well as a trackplan, most layouts are illustrated with a drawing showing the finished model. Most of these are superb and simply flicking through the pages is a joy - good thing really as I don't read German.

My favourite is this winter scene. You just don't see this sort of thing in British plan books - it's completely mad. Rack railways, viaducts and a cable car in space 1.5m by 1.15.

I wonder if anyone has built this for real?

If your club doesn't have this book, you can buy Ideenreiche Modellbahn-Anlagen at Amazon

3 comments:

Huw Griffiths said...

If anyone has actually built this layout, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a mainland European outline manufacturer or a specialist retailer.


In the past, some of these manufacturers used to turn up at exhibitions with layouts (or sometimes dioramas) like this - in glass cases - to make everyone's jaws drop as we went past.

OK - I'm sure that the official reason was to show what could be done using their products - well they certainly did that ... .


Certain (generally) high-end retailers also had similar displays in their shops - either where everyone could see them - or in a side room, where you had to "jump through hoops" to see them.

The ones I saw were worth seeing - but some of them seemed to inspire and depress in equal measure.

Initial thoughts of "WOW!" would quickly be followed by my jaw dropping so much that my beard would probably hit the spotless (and perfectly fitted) carpet in the side room of the shop in question.

This would then be followed by a realization that I'm never likely to have the money, skills or time to build something similar myself.

I suspect that a number of other people might have reacted in a similar manner.

Anonymous said...

This layout has been built (after the book) by a Dutch model railroader and was shown on exhibitions. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of that fellow.

It is a great book anyway. Many of the layouts were built later. The real thing looks like on Ivo Cordes' images. He doesn't cheat when illustrating.

Anonymous said...

This is the website of the person who built this layout
http://www.depassarel.nl