SBB on the Pennstadt - Valdorf Line

I have always liked the Krok, even when modelling US,etc. so it was inevitable that I would eventually turn to the SBB for some stock. First off, I have bought a new 39568 Krok and a 2nd hand Marklin 482 from Rails of Sheffield on EBay. Rails admitted that they couldn't test the 482 so I got £10 off the price - Not bad value at £80 - no sound but you can't have everything.

Now, I had to get some stock. First off was a pack of three 3rd class SBB coaches. Again, these came from EBay at a cost of £40. These are Roco, I belive and one even has a slider and lighting fitted. I am investigating how to get lights into the other two coaches. Here is one of them. The others are the same.

I then dashed of to my LHS and ordered 6 Roco 'aggregate' wagons - these came in at £25.00 each. The cost of all these is proving to be very acceptable.

I found these four mineral wagons on EBay for £40.00!

I have written a nice little bit of web software that provides me with trains to run. For my Open University degree, I wrote a program that provided for the routing of freight cars on US model railroads. This was great to use but it did demand that you run your trains exactly to the schedule because it needed to know the physical location of every loco, wagon and caboose. I didn't want anything so complicated with my nice little Marklin train set so I fitted up a "shadow station" with four tracks off the main board and wrote some software to propose trains to run.

This requires that I can find the exact wagons it is asking for. I then accept the train, make it up, run it and then release all the components. To make this easy, I have everything in open trays so that I can find and replace things easily.

This is the box that I built for my new SBB equipment.

This sits on top of the wardrobe until required!

The locos are in little carriers that make it easy to lift them out and put them back without damage.

The mineral wagons came in a nice polystyrene box so, rather than make the tray even bigger, I chose to leave them where they are.

There is a piece of ribbon glued to the top of each locations. This ribbon is run under each wagon. Pulling on this gets the wagon out without a lot of gripping, etc. The coaches have two ribbons and a bar between them. As you pull on the bar, the coach rotates and is easy to hold.

Finally, when packed up, it looks like this.

Here is a video of both the Krok and the 482 running on my layout.