Earlier this month I attended the 2026 Faszination Modellbahn hobby event at the Maimarkthalle near downtown downtown Mannheim–about an hours’ drive from my house in Kaiserslautern. Faszination Modellbahn was a little like an American RPM event, a little bit like an NMRA meet, and a little bit like a train show–except they got 10,000 people through the...

Alongside the work I’m doing on HO models and layout planning, I continue to build a few O scale models in O scale fine scale, or Proto 48 as it’s called. It’s a hobby within my hobby.

My last post on O scale models was published in December 2024, when I wrote about freight cars I was building for Tony Koester’s Proto48 Wabash High Line layout. That post ca...

Merry Christmas! I hope you and your families are enjoying a blessed holiday season!

Since moving back to Germany last January, I’ve been planning on building a small layout in my upstairs loft. I’ve studied modeling Farmington, Lakeville and Chaska Minnesota on the former Milwaukee Road Hastings & Dakota (H&D) Division among a few other locations, and poste...

Before getting to modeling, here’s some railway preservation news from the Southwest Germany that you never knew you cared about.

Back in August my wife noticed on the front page of our local newspaper, Die Wochenblatt, that a German steam locomotive on display in Kaiserslautern had been moved with great fanfare to the nearby town of Otterbach.

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