ARS Technica

On a snowy mountain ridge in the Ardennes lies the small village of Losheim. The slow cold wind turns the wind mills slowly overhead. Which feet can be seen, the rest is obscured by fog. The over-snowed war graves on the ground can occasionally be seen in this cold and silent village. In the former custom offices of the Belgian-German border a strange mixture of a model train shop, museum and impressive railroad layout has emerged. You enter a model train shop, which is fairly impressive in size, gauges and accessories. Then you walk up a set of stairs, pass the tourniquet with your entrance ticket and you are in a toy train museum.

The exhibition has many interesting layouts and toy trains. Although my interest was focused on the prewar Fandor, Märklin, Bing and Krauss trains. But I did appreciate to learn from gauge TT Rokal and gauge S Bub and Stadtilm as well.

The West-German made toy train of Bub in scale S.

And the East-German made toy train of Stadtilm in scale S.

A beautiful gantry crane of Krauss toy trains.

And loads of prewar tin-plate train cars.

Sufficient cheerfully coloured cars to make you happy on such a cold winters day.

There is not just a few display cabinets, but rather many dozens. Obviously I restrained myself to prewar tinplate.

After the museum part with the old trains, there are multiple layouts. Fortunately most layouts and displays are meant for toy trains, but some local bloke went bazerk on modelling a Roman settlement, which is beyond prewar, in fact beyond pretrain. Then they have a small Laurel and Hardy cinema and many more operated toy train layouts.

Well, I took too many pictures, anyway, I reckon you get the message, whenever you are passing a mountain ridge between Belgium and Germany and you fancy seeing some toy trains, then you better stop at the Ardenner Culture Boulevard in Losheim to visit the ARS Technica. And no, I do not grasp the name of the facility either, but it is a nice display, for sure.

A new house on the layout

Sometimes you are lucky and today I had a good day. I received a beautiful tin building with a nice lithograph for free from a person who cleaning his house and gave it away. So, the best thing to do, is to put along side the tracks and run some trains. The house is made by Bing and has a diamond sign with GBN (Gebrüders Bing Nürnberg) in the middle, which means that it is German from before 1923. Although the house has many scratches - a proof of much former joy- it will be easily restored with some paint if I really feel like it. But, currently I am hesistant to put a brush on it and reacon I will leave if as it is, well for the time being. The house has two floors, one door, seven windows and a chimney. Perhaps it was meant to be signal house along the tracks of a toy train. Well it has found a suitable place on my layout.