Sunny autumn afternoon

With the lovely sunny autumn weather, I felt obliged to get outside and run the new diner coach. It ran great. The Merkur coaches with Bing couplers couple easy with pre-war Lionel trains with latch couplers, but pre-war Lionel is a bit under scale as compared to the modern Merkur tin-plate toy trains. But the modern MTH engines are a better size match and they also let the coaches run smoothly.

A string of colourful happiness

Pre-war Lionel trains look kind of small compared to these
huge Merkur coaches.

Dutch scale zero meeting in Zutphen

This weekend, the Dutch scale zero train meeting was held in Zutphen. Since most Dutch model railroaders are into half-zero or N, the scale zero public is limited and the gathering has a nice peaceful atmosphere. Up to a few years ago, this was the holy domain of fine scalers, scratch builders and rivet counters. But the toy trains have expanded to here as well. First, brands like Lenz and MTH made more and more European scale zero trains, which are very highly detailed, although some rivet counters will always be difficult to please and we start to see those trains in Zutphen now as well. Secondly, the local Merkur dealer has gained his own table in the group and achieved some pretty good sales with coarse scale Merkur trains, that run on 3 rails...

Yes indeed, here are some MTH engines on sale.

Some fancy coaches.

Nice modelling on the modular layout

It can't get more Dutch than this, I reckon!

Here is the Merkur-Lehnhardt display table with some nice trains running smoothly on the table. The sales representative of Merkur told me that it is likely that Merkur will also commence to produce AC trains in stead of those DC only engines. Would be a very good idea, as far as I am concerned. Also a larger hopper can be expected in the coming year.

Anyway, I could not resist and purchased a beautiful red diner car, Merkur 9331.

Merkur 9331 diner coach.