Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Railcar ideas- Class 650


Westerooge is currently a gooey mess: I've added some form to the basic board, especially around the lighthouse base and the track, and I've covered the lot with grass and other bits. I'm now hoping that it sticks to the baseboard and not to the track. I'll get back to you on that.

This weekend I had to go and pick someone up from the station in Metzingen, so naturally I went early to take a few pictures. Metzingen is a junction on the railway between Stuttgart and Tübingen: German railways are often rather picturesquely known by the places they run through rather than the places they connect, so this route is called the Neckar-Alb-Bahn, after a river and range of hills.

Most trains are class 143 locomotives hauling double deck stock and this blog already has lots of pictures of these, so I won't bore you with them, but I also got the chance to photograph a these railcars. DB calls them class 650, although the many private railways using them call them Regio-Shuttle's, the name given to them by Stadler, their maker. There is a branch line from Metzingen to Bad Urach (the Ermstalbahn, if you're taking notes) operated is DB ZugBus.

650 012-8, the rear of the pair seen above. Notice the buffers.

I've wanted to make a narrow gauge version of one of these for ages. RS1's have a fair bit of power and the ones with conventional buffers have been known to haul the odd freight wagon, which I imagine would make them popular with the accountants of the Körschtalbahn- especially as mixed trains are common on other modern narrow gauge lines. I could well see one of those pulling a couple of vans into the hills. The only problem is that they'd be hard to build: I think I could get away with having tinted glass, which would let me put a normal motor inside and avoid making loads of tiny seats, but The question is how I can find a way to make those angled window struts and compound curves on the ends work.


I'm open to ideas. In the meantime Westerooge will hopefully be a lot less gooey and I can post some pictures...

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