10.12.07 at 14:35 hrs

Weekly Report No 371, CW 49

Just in time for xmas the small christmas market has been set up in the Hamburg section.

As always in the last years we also have the „Wunderlander Light Festival“ started this year as well. All in all, we have 590 illuminated christmas trees all over the layout.

In Switzerland, Knuffingen, and in the Harz mountains you can see special christmas trees made by Messrs. Mayrhofer. The SMD – Leds are very delicately hidden in the trees in a way that one barely sees them when switched off.

The Swiss section still had a couple of open building projects. These have been finished one by one, like this puppet theater. Unfortunately, we cannot show you the action in the photo – but just touch the button in front of the medivial castle and you’ll see what happens ;-)

We are very often asked how we reach derailed trains, especially in the Swiss section. To achieve this, we have special „walk – on“ platforms , integrated into the layout. But since these platforms are hidden sometimes difficult to retrieve, we had to find something special to make this task a bit easier – on each platform are small red sidemarkers. These start at the layout’s edge and reach ….

… right into the mountains showing the path to the derailed trains. These lights only comes on if a colleague has to walk into the layout.

When you stroll alongside the layout in these days, you can see this sign:

The reason for this sign are very comprehensive modernizing and re-modelling works of this section, like the conveyor shown in the picture. After two years of wear and tear it desperately needed a thorough makeover.

Here in the Hamburg section, Wolfgang exchanges a couple of turnouts (old out, new in). Since he’s already at it, he also repairs the complete overhead catenary :-)

Another location to be refurbished is our control stand. During the last weeks, it became anew separation wall and in the coming weeks the monitor area will als be modernized and all slots be filled with screens.

The bistro also experienced a small change and received seats from an original ICE train. Now, one can indulge in a bit of train flair… We are still working on changing the Hamburger –Speicherstadt-Panorama in front of the windows so the visitor really feels like sitting in a train :-)