A Railway Modelling Meme

I've participated in a weekly meme for one of my two hobbies in Game WISH, this attempts to cover my other hobby, railway modelling, in the much same sort of way. It might crash and burn after just a few weeks, but let's give it a try. I'll see what sort of response the first one gets before making this a regular permanent addition to the Working Timetable.

I'm also stuck for a snappy title or corny acronym. Suggestions are welcome.

If you've got your own blog, post your response there, and either use the Moveable Type trackback facility or leave a link to your entry in the comments. If you don't have your own blog, just post your response in the comments.

The first one's inspired a bit by Iain Rice's "Mainlines in Modest Spaces", and is a development of an earlier idea of mine. Imagine you are building a model of a main line or secondary route with a reasonable variety of traffic. Rather than a generic 'somewhere in central England' or the equally generic 'on the border between Switzerland and Belgium', the layout is either a specific location, or at least a specific route, and set in a fixed year.

You have space for a fiddle yard (or staging roads, if you're on the left hand side of the Atlantic) with six roads, giving you a maximum capacity of six complete trains.

What are those six trains? They have to represent both a representative cross-section of the traffic on your chosen location, and represent some of the 'signature trains' that will identify the area and period to any casual viewer that's familiar with the prototype. A good example would be a blue class 37 on a long train of clayhoods representing Cornwall in the mid 1980s.

I've done a post for the Cornish mainline in the mid 1970s, late 1980s and early 2000s. So this time I'll attempt my other favourite route, the Lötchberg line in Switzerland. This is a busy international mainline with a wide variety of freight and passenger traffic; trying to boil things down to just six important trains is going to be a challenge. I'll set the date to my most recent visit, 2003.

1) We need a Swiss internal formation representing the Basel-Brig shuttles. These are push-pull formations made up from EWiv stock headed either an SBB Re460 or a BLS class Re465 locomotive. Since this is the BLS line, we'll go for a rake of these coaches in BLS blue/cream rather than the SBB green/grey. Unfortunately there's no N gauge model of the driving trailer, so we'll have to do without.

2) For the second passenger train, we'll take a rake of DB coaches, in the new ICE style mostly white livery representing through trains to or from Germany, of which there are two workings in each direction during daylight hours. Unfortunately I'd just purchased an eight coach set of the excellent Fleischmann coaches just before DB changed their livery; all mine are in the older red and white colour scheme.

3) One signature freight train is the 'Rolling Road' lorry transporter, with a passenger coach up front carrying the lorry drivers and a line of special low floor wagons carrying the lorries. Motive power will be a pair of BLS Re465s. I'm still waiting for the promised Hobbytrain model of the special Hupac livery passenger coach used

4) The other signature freight train has to be the Limburg to Reggio clay train, which requires three locomotives to make it to the summit. Last summer it was DBAG class 185s or brand new BLS class 485s painted in silver and florescent green. I'm still waiting for a N gauge model of these, but Fleischmann have promosed the 185 in their 2004 programme. The wagons are Fleischmann Tammns, which I know have the wrong bogies.

5 and 6) While we could do with a third passenger train, I thought a rake of SBB EWivs would be too similar to (1), so I'm going to go for two further freights. One will have to be a classic mixed freight; mostly vans and bogie tankers, but steel carriers and car transporters could be added as well, powered by an Re10/10, which is the SBB term for a double headed combination of an Re6/6 and a smaller Re4/4. The final train will be an intermodal working made up of swapbodies, behind a pair of the BLS's brown Re4/4s.

To be honest, reducing the varied traffic on the BLS to just six trains is a challenge; I'd like more variety of block freight, such as a block train of oil tankers. There's also no representation of the through passenger trains to Italy, made up from either SBB's two tone grey EC stock, or of FS coaches.