My formation and philosophy

When I was a kid a small single track metre gauge street car  passed in front of our house. It connected with a metre gauge electric overland-railroad that fascinated me. At age three I urged my mother to take the street car with me just for fun again and again. At age twelve I lived in a small town in the Harz mountains. It was the terminal of a 2 1/2‘ line with which my comrades came to school every morning. I became a narrow gauge fan without noticing it. It was a virus with a very long incubation period. Then I got my my first train set for christmas : Märklin H0; narrow gauge modeling had to wait.

It‘s wasting efforts to try to invent the wheel once again. Better look how the old ones had done it. Same thing with model railroading, especially with designing a layout. Learning can have tremendously  different effects depending on the sources you have at your disposal.

When I was 16 years old our English-teacher procured pen pals to all pupils and I got one who lived in Maine. When I had told him that I was interested in model railroading he sent me two issues of MODEL TRAINS (at 35 c. a piece). These two issues happend to contain the first two installments of Linn Westcott‘s „A railroad that grows and grows“ story which became later a bestselling book.

In these two installments I learned that a layout is not only a track arrangement to run trains in circles but that even a 4x8 can become a railroad with a purpose. Even more important for my formation than this story was an ad for the sister magazine MODEL RAILROADER that ignited my interest. But that was an expensive magazine, 50c. per issue and the dollar at over 4 DM at that time. And my pocket money was extremely limited. The only solution was to beg a subscription for MR for christmas. My parents had a lot of trouble to transfer the money from Germany to the United States and the first issue arrived just in time for my eighteenth birthday.

This way my formative years differed quite a bit from those of most youngsters in Germany who read, if anything, the MIBA. At that time Paul (not Russ) Larson was editor and I must say that he conveyed his philosophy of model railroading and layout building in a convincing manner that stirred my creativity.

It was the times when point-to-point and walk around principles came into the world, when the first trackplans with peninsulas appeared in print and when the first card order systems for freight car forwarding were presented to an amazed public. And I happened to be at the source while most german model railroaders learned about these progressive developments decades later.

However it was not possible to build a layout at once. Professional formation, a wife and two kids, building a house etc. kept the model railroad bug at bay for a long time. My first real point-to-point pike was a G-scale garden layout, one of the first at all. I wrote articles for the LGB-Depesche, LGB‘s house magazine, right after they launched their G-scale program. Our garden was relatively small, but a U-shaped 90 foot mainline with three towns, a switch back and a loop a la Georgetown could be installed.

Here I had my first operating sessions with a friend. With a sequence time-table and a simple card order system we had the railroad do a real job.

Some years later I abandoned the garden pike and started building an H0-layout in the attic because I wanted to build scenery and structures and all the detail that make a real model railroad. The new layout was point-to-point, too, of course but with a more sophisticated concept. Now I had a fast clock and a real car card/way bill-system a la Doug Smith. Instead of walk around we had a roll around system, because the attic had so little clearance that the operators had to sitt on low stools with casters.

At the turn of the seventies/eighties I founded FREMO and with a couple of friends introduced modular model railroading to Germany.  The first FREMODUL system was H0. It had a very good success. But  I wanted narrow gauge. A dozen of friends, too. We discussed about the scale for a narrow gauge modular system. For some time there was a competence between S and 0 scale, but we finally settled on 0m, meter gauge in 0-scale. I stuck with it.

Then a similar thing happened as a decade earlyer with the garden pike. I lost interest in modular railroading and wanted a real pike again. But 0m scale. That way the BAE was born.

27th July 2007

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