Friday 8 March 2024

Local bus for P’dorf


Pottendorf has a bus stop but until now, no suitable bus, it needed to be smaller than the usual 50+ seat monster, if only because it needs to in proportion to both the small station and the local lanes. 

The answer is the little bus from Ulm, it was debuted by Setra at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1955. For the first time, the company offered the smallest bus that had ever left its production lines, the Setra S 6 was a truly tiny vehicle with a length of just 6.70m, it could accommodate 25 passengers in comfort, it was referred to as a “Midibus”. 

The little Setra was very popular with both operators and passengers, it was manufactured in Ulm for nine years and 1,172 left the production line at Kässbohrerstraße in Ulm. 

Having acquired a suitable 'local' bus. a bus-stop is needed? In addition, the other essentials of a rural station forecourt.

Courtesy of Wolfgang DSO

The 'communications hub' of telephone kiosk, post box and mechanical stamp machine, beside the bus-stop sign plus the unseen rusting bicycle rack.

The telephone kiosk in the above image is a FH53/55 suitable for the mid '50s onwards but there were the '30s vintage FH32 still around which had survived WW2, a lovely example is to be found in Lübars on the edge of West Berlin.

Thankfully Brawa offer a ready to plonk example, at a price. The rest of the post office hardware is available, it is a simple matter of 'who sells what'

Post box+stamp machine - Kotol.de
Bike rack and bus stop sign- Auhagen
99030C + 11419
Kiosk - Brawa 5447


Tim 

Wednesday 14 February 2024

A journey from here to there

A personal philosophy 

In order to be a modeller of railways there needs to be a model railway. It doesn't matter if it is a loft or an Ikea box, there has to be a railway, otherwise we are mere collectors of things in boxes.

Occasionally, a thought begins to become a concern, why build a model railway and why choose a particular subject? My obsession, for it is an obsession, is to create something that pleases the eye and restores old memories of quiet rural railways of Southern Germany. 

I greatly admire those individuals who devout a lifetime to build a perfect representation of a actual location, set at a specific time/date. Their dedication is admirable but there are constraints, as they can utilise space and have access to information, neither of which I enjoy. By contrast, my world is one of limited to just 5m x 1m and limited information from both the internet and the few books that feature my chosen subject.

My project is based upon a notion that a modest rural line in the Fichtelgebirge  had been extended a few more kilometres before funding was finally exhausted and the planned wayside station became a terminus for the remainder of its short life.

The generic trackplan is simple, the only extravagance is a tiny wooden loco shed with fuel+water and the style of the station buildings is typical of the builder.

Various features (LDEs) from around the location are recycled, all chosen for their similarity to other local features. Colours are carefully chosen from a palette used in the location, mostly natural, a mix of greens + earth, subtle rather than brash.

The stock was carefully selected with help from local experts, there are no 'special' visitors as everything must have been used on rural lines within 25kms during the timeframe 1950-68.

I hope that this explains my approach.

Tuesday 5 December 2023

An introduction

The blog is about building a small fictitious terminus based on Leupoldsdorf but definitely not a copy, it is merely an amalgam of features of existing locations in Fichtelgebirge, in short, a plausible fiction.

This is a track plan of the layout.

 

Oct 2022 Four old baseboards were cleaned and prepared for new track


Mar 2023

 
February 2024 The platform receives a coat of Acrylmasse textured light grey paint and the roads and station yard have been repainted with limestone paint and layer of Acrylmasse.
 
 
 All the track has been ballasted, ready for testing

 
The wherefore of operation on Pottendorf
 
The layout in the shed is small, only about 3,4m of scenic area with four storage roads, this means that it is a shunting puzzle rather than ‘parade’ style layout. Four is the magic number as there were just four trains per day on a typical branch in the mid ‘50s. 
 
The stocklist reflects the purpose of the layout, just six wagons, three coaches and a railbus are the four trains that shuffle backwards and forwards. The wagons form two trains, the coaches another with the railbus as the simple shuttle that does not shunt at all. 
 
Each of the four scenic roads has at least one uncoupler, the platform has two so that after uncoupling from the head of the train, the loco can pick off vehicles from the train and set them into sidings. 
 
Running through all four trains should take about 25-30 minutes of intense concentration, enough to keep me happy.

The allotments

There are a couple of vegetable gardens on Pottendorf, examples of the Schrebergärten movement started by Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber (15 October 1808 – 10 November 1861) His publications predominantly dealt with the subject of children's health and the social consequences of urbanization at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Schreber was the founder of the eponymous "Schreber movement".  In 1864, the first Schrebergärten , was established by leasing land for the physical exercise of children.

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 Move forward 150+ years and you're zipping along in an ICE high-speed train, munching happily away on your bratwurst , just as you're wiping the last blob of mustard from the corner of your mouth, a lazy glance out the window, though, comes as a shock. Rather than the well-ordered suburbs or well-kept factories you have come to expect- miniature houses tucked in next to the train tracks as far as the eye can see.

It's a sight that greets visitors on the approach to almost every town in Germany --  the clutter of ladders and rakes leaning against the back of the structures, neatly ordered flowerbeds, well-tended fruit trees and picture-perfect picket fences are lined up like regiments of tin soldiers. The phenomenon is known as a Schrebergärten -- an area outside the city where the gardening-obsessed Germans can rent out a small plot and plunge their fingers into the soil.

But while getting back to nature is an instinct many of us indulge in, the German gardener takes it very seriously indeed. Flawlessly clipped lawns, neatly sculpted bushes, and flowerbeds entirely free of even the tiniest weed are the norm with many gardens revealing a feng shui exactness that would put a Japanese bonsai master to shame. Other vegetation virtuosos prefer a more playful perfection and opt for a liberal distribution of garden gnomes and plastic windmills with cheap replicas of Greek fountains and other water features a must for those with a bit of cash to burn.

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  Ordered, trimmed, enclosed, ornamental, each strip has some kind of glorified shed with floral and vegetable displays. As for people, they’re only temporary visitors, because however fabulous the summerhouse/cottage/shed – and some are very fancy –one of the many hundreds of rules is that a Schrebergärten is strictly non-residential and rules are there to be obeyed. These enclosures are the garden equivalent of white bread: nature with the wildness extracted – and with more fertilizer per square metre than any farmer would dare to use.

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I like creating Schrebergärten, mine are largely Busch, Noch and scratch, they include strawberries, green and red cabbage, cauliflower, green and red lettuce. Over the next couple of weeks, I would like to share the creation of a Schrebergärten for Pottendorf.

Scenery

The Fichtelgebirge, the hills and the valleys 
 
 
 

Around the region




 
 A short film of another local railway line - the Sekundärbahn Erlangen–Eschenau
 

Thursday 5 October 2023

Stock for Pottendorf

The passenger and goods stock, there are just half a dozen of each.

Four-wheel coaches of great antiquity were in use right up to the end of steam on surviving branches, into the 1960s, these being the original ‘turn of the century’ designs for branch work. The nearest thing to ‘modern’ was the appearance of the steel four-wheel coaches of ‘Thunderbox’ type on some lines and these dated from the 1920s, but even these were not so common in Bavaria where the old Bavarian short and long four-wheelers were available in some numbers.
 
A few images of passenger and other related rolling stock locos on Bavarian branchlines with thanks to Robert Zintl








 

Most of the locos would have been used on a branchline in Oberfranken.

 




 
 Models

Most of the models represent the stock that may have been used on a quiet rural branchline although maybe not at the same time.


Rolling Stock