Merkur passenger cars

Today, I visited a toy train shop which sells Merkur trains. Merkur tinplate toy trains in scale zero have a long history and they still up to this day produce tin-plate toy trains of European, mostly Czech railways. Merkur has a distinctive style; solid metal, well painted and a bit rough on details (which stems form the fact that it is plastic free metal toy train). The trucks are a bit similar to those of Williams; diecast metal. I purchased two passenger cars; Merkur 9330 and Merkur  9751.
Merkur 9330 is a green passenger car with a first and second class compartment . It is 42 cm (approx. 17 inch) long and weighs 800 grams. Merkur 9751 is a blue passenger car with a luggage and passenger compartment, is also 42 cm long and weighs roughly 900 grams. The luggage doors can be opened and closed. Both carriages are equipped with Bing type couplers (hook and eye), so I need to change one for a claw, but that is easily done. The coupler is held in place by a washer and a nut.
These carriages were taken for a ride by an American Camelback engine of MTH, although an impossible line up. Neverthless they just ran nice on my old JEP tracks with 042 curves.

Besides the passenger cars I also bought two tubular style switches. The nice thing of Merkur track is that it is completely compatible with Lionel tubular tracks and has simply three pins on one side and none at the other. This in contrast to Märklin and JEP rails with two pins up and one down. Merkur has three different switches, similar to their curves, with curves of 22.5 degree (or 1/16th circle) and radii of 625 mm, 760 mm and 900 mm, which would roughly correspond to 050, 060 and 072 curves of American tubular track. My Lionel and MTH engines run smoothly over these switches. These are manual controlled with a big yellow lever and once in position, they will keep it. Because it is solid technology. Meaning that running an engine over such a switch when it is in the wrong position will result in derailment.

The standard length of Merkur tubular track is about 12 inch, so bit longer than 10 inch Lionel tubular track. In the picture below a Lionel 027 switch is compared to a Merkur 060 switch. Clearly the difference in curvature and length can be seen.

I used the run-your-own-Märklin-trains-event in the museum to run the Merkur carriages with an old Märklin steamer. That was just fine.