Bernhards Random Ramblings BACKUP

What do you do on a Sunday afternoon? I spent it watching a cab view video on Youtube. 2 hours from Offenburg in the Rhine Valley following the Black Forest Railway ("Schwarzwaldbahn") via Hausach, Triberg, Villingen-Schwenningen, and Singen to Konstanz on Lake Constance. In my version of reality, the Welztalbahn connects to the Schwarzwaldbahn in Hausach. I have also traveled the segment between Immendingen and Singen many times when taking the Intercity between Stuttgart and Zurich. One of the new IC2 sets is visible in the video . It's nice to watch the video and know the area well enough that I can identify the train location in the loops between Hausach and Triberg, or recognize the meadow near St. Georgen where I stopped with my Dad to take photos as inspiration for the Welztalbahn. While watching the video, I continued to work on replacing the grab irons for SVL 68156 . They are certainly not perfect, and I realize I picked a pretty difficult and annoying car to ...

After the successful build of a Bowser wood hopper car , which is now waiting for weathering, I'm stepping up the challenge with the second car in the series: Replace the molded on grabirons and stirrup steps with detail parts from A-Line and Tichy. I already removed the CNW lettering and heralds and will replace them with Silicon Valley Lines lettering like the previous car after a coat of paint.

Another addition to the freight car fleet on the Welztalbahn is Maerklin's new rendition of a Dresden Glr in Epoch IV as type Gbkl 238. Comparing the car to the drawings in Stefan Carstens' Gueterwagen book series ("Gedeckte Wagen, Band 1") shows that Maerklin did a pretty good job to capture the prototype. Not many of these cars survived into the 1970's, since their parts were used as basis for a rebuild program into type Glmms 61 and Gltmms 62 in the early 60's. Thus, this car will remain the only one of its kind on the Welztalbahn. This should be a fun weathering exercise at some point in the future, since by the time the layout is set in, the car should look fairly shabby ... Since I have reached the maximum number of cars that this layout can reasonably handle, I will need to decide which other cars will be replaced by the new additions and taken out of service for now.