Jean & I consider ourselves veteran travelers and usually travel on our own, but we just returned from a 3 week tour organized and operated by a company called “Model Train Travel”. That name says a lot about the trip and we did visit a number of layouts, but the tour includes lots more than layouts. Travel between cities is by rail and we also visited railroad museums, a “steam festival”, automobile factories and museums, castles, the Black Forest in Germany, and toured numerous cities on sightseeing buses. Group size is limited so we got lots of personal attention and I can’t overstate how much we enjoyed this trip.
I met Anton Seckler, the “Conductor” at the Eastern Division of The TCA York meet last year. He is originally from Cologne, Germany and now resides in California. His mastery of everything German made this trip easy (translation of menus, signs, etc.) and his knowledge and connections enabled us to learn much more than we might have on our own. His website is very helpful: http://www.modeltraintravel.com and he will be at York next month, so I won’t post an itinerary, but here are a few (I shot more than 600) photos of highlights:
Steam in the Street in Heidelberg
A (Chapelon?) Pacific in the French National Railway Museum
Service & Test Facility at a layout in Schramberg. They called it Gauge 2 and there is nothing commercially available so EVERYTHING is scratchbuilt.
A loco on the same layout.
Neuschwanstein Castle - Disney's Inspiration?
Model Train Show inside a large service facility in Meiningen, Germany. They called the place Dampflokwerk, loosely translated to Steam Locomotive Works.
The show was part of a festival that had 8 or 9 steamers operating.
And giving cab rides.
The public was welcome to wander about the facility with little restriction, we got an hourlong tour in English.
The Loxx layout in Berlin, located on the top floor of a modern shopping mall.
Another Loxx shot.
The highlight of the trip, Minatur Wonderland in Hamburg.
A Rock Concert - more than 20,000 figures.
The TGV between Paris and Frankfurt, 318km/hr is about 197 mph.
Record holder Mallard having some attention at the British Railway Museum in York.
