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S. Berliner, III's

Saga Continuation - Page 6

Consultant in Ultrasonic Processing
"changing materials with high-intensity sound"
Technical and Historical Writer, Oral Historian
Popularizer of Science and Technology
Rail, Auto, Air, Ordnance, and Model Enthusiast
Light-weight Linguist, Lay Minister, and Putative Philosopher

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THE BERLINERWERKE-Z SAGA

TOUR of the BERLINERWERKE-Z

{photos and diagrams follow}

OOPS! - I had neglected to post the scanned images!
That omission has now been rectified - finally (07 Aug 03)!

Bilder von dem

Views of the Berlinerwerke-Z

(the Z-Scale Berliner Works)

My mythical great-grand-uncle Weiner Berliner (V'ner Bearl'ner) founded a small ironworks in Germany.  It was moved to the U.S.A., ending up (for now, in Z) near the head of the LIRR's Oyster Bay line.  The rationale of the HO Berlinerwerke is to justify fitting the Horseshoe Curve onto one end (in exact scale!), connecting Pittsburgh and the Allegheny tunnels with Sunnyside Yard, the LIRR, and the great railroad bridge across Long Island Sound from Orient Point to Rhode Island (bet you didn't even know it was there).

The BW plant includes a major museum and restoration shop, as well as a heavy erecting facility, so anything can and does run on the BW without chronological or geographical restrictions.  There is an excursion RR and a heavy-equipment transport group.  All this justifies some pretty weird rolling stock.

I trust everyone has by now noticed (winced over) my blithe and complete disregard for time, place, country, language, sense, etc.  This, too, has a rationale ("rationale", not "rational").

Re the images that follow, which are only record shots, not art photos, I had made up a small photo album and pasted Post-It^™ tape over the extraneous (and confusing) background; here, I have gone even further and crudely retouched out the remaining background. (07 Aug 03)

The bigger images are thumbnailed; click on highlighted photos for even larger images.

All photos 1997 (except as noted) by and © S. Berliner, III 1997, 2003.

View to the "Northwest"

Left  -  the Mercerized Bents yard with two Brawa towers and two old 8621 crane bodies.  The newer 8621 crane is a late model in dark blue (as on Page 87 in 1986/87 E); my original is from ca. 1980 or 81 and is light blue (as shown in the 1981 catalog).  Anyone wanna trade either crane body?

Center foreground  -  the new Berliners Bessere Ballast Belastungen (and Sams Schöner Schotter und Schlake Zech  -  Produkten der Berliner Ballast Bergwerk, i.e.: Berliner's Better Ballast Loads and Sam's Finer Gravel and Cinders Tipple - Products of the Berliner Ballast Mine)!
A heavily-modified Kibri 6750 Schotterwerk (Gravel Tipple).

Mercerized Bents, Inc.

(Mercerized Bents, Inc.  -  looking "Northwest")

"AUF DER ZWEIFACH STERN"

FINE GERMAN BRIDGE BENTS GUARANTEED
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD A LUSTROUS FINISH

a subsidiary of the Berlinerwerke

2632 Factory (Mercerized Bents).  Note shortened Micro Engineering 80-176 N-scale Tall Steel Viaduct Tower on ground; ~140' high in Z, less one 49mm panel (great source for spare girders for the Mercerized Bents yard, as on fork lift).

[Pictures 2 (preceding) and 3 (following) were incorrect;
2 has been rescanned and 3 renumbered.] (04 May 98)

View to the "Northeast"  (foreground  -  left-to-right)

Kibri 6772 Shedhalle (Restinghouse Air Break  -  makes ultrasonic shock wave generators (it says here);
"You can be shocked if it's Restinghouse".)

2634 Freight Station (serves Restinghouse, Mercerized Bents, etc.
Z version of the famed (HO) DD Diesel Delivery Dept.
("Dependable Drayage")

Kibri 6774 Boiler House and 2630 Passenger Station (so tiny it's perfect for Bright Moment Station,
releasing Dürnau to serve the biffie plant)

2639 Barn (the BW Maintenance Shop) and sites of 2638 Ranch House (BW Security Dept.) and 2631 2-story House (Restinghouse Rasthaus - Rasthaus translates literally as "resting house")

View to the "North-Northwest"  -  background  -  left to right:

2635  -  Mine Head (Koll's Coal (Koll's Coal Coaling Tower)  -
rough paper mockup, final cardstock mockup, unmodified mine head

8996 Water Tower to the right, modified by cutting up that odd German fluted base and building a new cylindrical base from a medicine vial, using the stairs cut from the old base

Overhead crane, in center front, from the 6770 factory.

Modified 8990 Diesel Fuel Kit, center left, newly named

ES2O, Stranded Oil Co.

View to the "Northwest"

Modified Kibri Tank Farm
(from 6998 or older 6760 single kit)
Orion Tar ("We Three Kings of Orion Tar") modified by cutting left corner, moving horizontal tank to center, and relocating the affected piping

To rear, 8971 Rural Freight Shed  -  Shipping & Receiving for Berliners Bessere Biffi Bauerei and Orion Tar  - modified by cutting base to fit over 8590 Feeder Track contacts

View to the "North-Northwest"

partially completed 8972 Container Terminal crane and Noch 4746 Container Assortment:

 25mm (18') Eichhof Bier (with squirrel, yellow & red)              
 28mm (20') Exquisites NOCH - Modellbahn-Zubehör (tan, black & red) 
 32mm (23') Weitnauer Bier - die frische Freude (blue & white)      
 32mm (23') vedes (ship) Spiel+Freizeit (green with orange chevrons)
[47mm (34') Märklin standard container {ref.}]                      
[55mm (40') Märklin standard trailer {ref.}]                        
 58mm (42') Spar (white with green pine tree, red & green stripes)  

Berliner Bier cars to right

View to the "North-Northwest"

Heavily modified (shortened) Kibri 6730 Neustadt Overhead Signal Tower

Scale from 8985 Freight Station Detail set to left;
Undersized clearance gauge from 8985 to right

Berliners Bessere Biffi Bauerei in far right

8718 "Silberling" (Silverliner) Commuter Coach with Baggage Compartment and Engineer's Cab, heavily modified to be self propelled, with 8874 diesel chassis and rear truck grafted into rear (right) half of car

Innards of the self-propelled 8718 Cab Car showing standard commuter truck at front (left) and 8874 chassis cut into rear of car.  Note Märklin connector between car front chassis and diesel rear chassis.  Note also newer two-pin micro-connector (under) to be substituted to allow reversing lighting.

Heavily modified (shortened) Kibri 6730 Neustadt Overhead Signal Tower

Kitbashed by removing major section of long leg, moving extra windows to inner side of "L".

(looking at outer corner)

(looking at inner corner)

[15 Sep 00 - Here is a weird one; a homeowner on Long island has drastically expanded his/her home across a driveway such that it greatly resembles the Neustadt/Weinstrasse signal tower or one very similar to it - see the end of the preceding page for the photos (no room here).]

Left to right:

Koll's Kohl (Koll's Coal) Coaling Tower  -  "far" side rough paper mockup, final cardstock mockup, unmodified 2635 Mine Head

Serious clearance problems as shown

Left to right:

Koll's Kohl (Koll's Coal) Coaling Tower  -  "near" side, rough paper mockup, final cardstock mockup, unmodified 2635 Mine Head

Serious clearance problems as shown

Another detail to be worked on will be the sanding facility (piping and spouts).

Perhaps I'll pipe the sand across from the old 8982 hand-operated coal dock.

[I have noticed an unexpected esthetic problem due to the new dock;
the old dock now appears incredibly oversized, as if it were an N-scale model]

8996 Water Tower, modified by cutting up that odd German conical fluted base and building a new cylindrical base from a medicine vial, using the stairs cut from the old base

Micro-Trains 14907 Chessie System B&O 293952 40' plug door steel boxcar in B&O blue with yellow printing "doctored" to become an ersatz Great Northern/ Western Fruit Express 53794 wood-sheathed ice reefer!  I tried xerocopying the various N, TT, HO, S, and O scale GN/WFEX cars I have, but my copier wouldn't handle the yellow, so I xerocopied the lettering diagram included with my Tempe TT car.  I located strips of 1" wide 3M Post-it™ #658 6-line Correction & Cover-Up Tape accurately for twin images of the sides.  Then I ran a Sanford MAJOR ACCENT® Quick Reference Marker yellow highlighter over both strips, well past the outline of the sides; leaving the strips on the copy paper until the highlighter dried to avoid wrinkling.

I gave the car body a shot of sealer and then a coat of boxcar red.  Then I highlighted (highlit?) the sides again, let them dry again, and cut out the sides from the Post-it tape, affixed them, et, le voilà!  A GN\WFEX reefer (sort of).  If you're not in quite such a hurry, first carefully slice away the two side panels at each end of the roof walk (the access walks to the full-height side ladders) and cut and fit four ice hatches; in Z you can fake them to more or less fill the end roof panels on either side of the roof walk.  If you are really energetic, put hinges and latches on the hatches, with the hinges inboard and the latches centered on the outboard ends.  Would these be hatches latches patches?  If you press the tape really hard against the car side, the small ladders will show through, instead of merely causing weird bumps.  The highlighter ain't reefer yellow, but what the heck!  So, here it is, 50 years later and, in true "Retro" fashion, we're back to PAPER SIDES!  Ah, progress!

YaaAAAA!  The Micro-Trains boxcar doesn't clear even my expanded loading gauge!

It just {that was in mid-1997} dragged the gauge down the track on its very first run around the layout! And that's just an ordinary 40' boxcar, even if the paper sides do extend a hair above the plastic; what clearance will I need some day for the inevitable high cube or AC6000CW or SD90MAC?

A drawing of the track loading gauge, based on the prototype gauge included in Märklin's 8985 Freight Station Detail kit.  I raised the gauge twice, but now I have really bad news.  I ran a borrowed old 8856 Crocodile and the pans (pantographs) are way too high and wide for even my greatly-expanded clearance gauge.  The Croc pan extends beyond the gauge in both vertical height and horizontal width at that height!

Is there no end to this?

Another View to the "Northeast"  (foreground  -  left-to-right)

Kibri 6772 Shedhalle (Restinghouse Air Break)

2634 Freight Station - DD Diesel Delivery Dept.
("Dependable Drayage")

Kibri 6750 Schotterwerk (Gravel Tipple) with conveyor roof mockup in place

2632 Factory (Mercerized Bents)

Kibri 6774 Boiler House and 2630 Bright Moment Station with Thomas, Annie, and Clarabel

2639 Barn (the BW Maintenance Shop)

Noch 4752 Mercedes Muldenkipper (Dump Truck) with body removed and reinstalled tilted.  I'll fake hinges and a hydraulic lift cylinder on it.  No sense detailing a dump screen and not having a dump truck dumping on it, now is there?  Besides, it sure beats having a 1:220 elephant dumping there; a stinking idea (ewwww  -  gross, Grandpa!)

To my dismay, Noch has long-since discontinued the 4752 and 4753 Mercedes Benz Muldenkippern (dump trucks).

After fitting-up the major components of the Kibri 6750 gravel tipple, I decided there was absolutely no way the small dump house would fit in as intended.  That is, I assume that the little house on the lower end of the conveyor housing is a dump house, where trucks dump gravel to be carried up to the top of the tipple.  Whether or not that's so, it's a dump house now!

I popped off the bottom plate of the Kibri 6750 gravel tipple lower dump house (after securely bonding it the night before!  -  it took a bit of force, but did come loose without damage), cut out its center, and installed a grating by dropping in two segments cut from model ships' companionway (stairs, ye scurvy landlubber!) stock.

By angling the steps toward the viewer, they really look just right for a dump screen.

Overall view of junk (plus the Berlinerwerke-Z)
looking "north"; busy little layout, ain't it?

(Odd, I missed the Berlinerwerke station in all my detail shots;
it's that 8970 Wintersdorf station up in front slightly to the left of center
{and here it is in a doctored 8970 photo:}

Multi-purpose shot of the "north" side of the Berlinerwerke-Z, looking "west" along the rear of the layout
(where the 6" deep extension yard will go).

Note the cardstock mockup of the Koll's Coal coaling tower acting as an impromptu clearance gauge, the way the modified 8990 Diesel Fuel Kit, ES2O, Stranded Oil Co., overlaps the turntable margin, and the errant Neustadt tower in the transfer table pit!

That's the Kibri 6770 Factory, the Berliners Bessere Biffi Bauerei, in the background.

Yet Another View to the "Northwest"

Center foreground - the Berliners Bessere Ballast Belastungen (and Sams Schöner Schotter und Schlake Zech  -  Produkten der Berliner Ballast Bergwerk, i.e.: Berliner's Better Ballast Loads and Sam's Finer Gravel and Cinders Tipple - Products of the Berliner Ballast Mine)!

A heavily-modified Kibri 6750 Schotterwerk (Gravel Tipple).  I cut (inaccurately) the base back to fit between the newly-relocated "east" end of the main and the framing of the layout.  The dump house is turned 90º counter-clockwise and an intermediate hoist house and conveyor will be fabricated from scratch and installed to account for the turned dump house and the long distance to be traversed to allow truck access around the dump house to the ramp leading up under the tipple.

(more over, moreover)
[the album-appropriate humor of this fails on the scrolling-screen Web]

This little fillip also allows, rather neatly, for the exact ¼" difference in height between the top of the tipple ramp and the top of the layout framing alongside.  Raising the hoist house and the-now-upper conveyor ¼" seems to me to improve the actual appearance of the tipple complex; all that's required to fit the hoist house to the bridge across the ramp is to trim the tops of the vertical locator tabs that position the hoist house against the bridge.  The horizontal tab that was to be at the bottom of the bridge now simply disappears higher up inside the bridge.  Everything else on the tipple fits as Kibri intended and it just "belongs" where it is, even allowing for the overlap over the layout frame.  I also put a vertical plate under the hoisthouse wall above the ramp to look better and hide that part of the layout frame (it does both).  The paper mockup of the hoist house and conveyor also look rather good.

NOT SHOWN (yet - in 1997 album)

2631 2-story House (Restinghouse Rasthaus  -
Rasthaus translates literally as "resting house" or guest house):

2638 Ranch House (BW Security Dept.)  -  perfect for the BW Security Dept. office, even to the two-car garage for the patrol cars (I had to go out and buy Noch station wagons for patrol cars!); it looks just like the ones at many universities, industrial plant complexes, and research facilities I've visited.

2633 Feed Mill  -  the Elgin Marbles Co. ("Don't Lose Your Marbles").
I have a source for 125µm (125 micrometers or 0.0049" or five-thousandths of an inch) nominal diameter glass beads, which scale out to approximately 1-¹/ ₈".  That makes an only-slightly overscale aggie.  A Davis-Hodgkin small hopper with a simulated full load of these (ACC'd or white glued together on top of a filler block to keep them from blowing away or spilling and rolling all over the place like ultra-miniature ball bearings) would make a great load.  The plant will be under the able direction of Rosetta Stone, a woman of letters who's hobby is translating Egyptian hieroglyphics.  Unfortunately, only well-educated readers (no superabundance of such in model railroading) will get these japes.  I understand that they make lovely, white jackets with extra long arms for people like me.

BIG NEWS! - the management of Elgin Marbles proudly announces the completion of production of a whole fleet of 24' single-bay hopper cars to carry vast amounts of product to market.  The cars were produced by the noted German manufacturer, Freudenreich Feinwerktechik, and here is a builder's photo of car #171, just released:

(Freudenreich photo Jan 03 - all rights reserved)

Better yet, the entire fleet of cars arrived from Freudenreich on 22 Jan 03 and
here is the Elgin factory photo of cars #170, #171, and #174, as received:

(22 Jan 03 photo by and © 2003 S. Belriner, III - all rights reserved)

Now, to load them up with 1:220 marbles (and find my close-up lenses - or microscope);
each car can hold about 4 MILLION marbles!

Berliners Bessere Biffie Bauerei (Berliner's Better Biffy Builders)
is a noted manufacturer of biffies (outhouses) made of depleted uranium so they can't be tipped over while in use.  They require unique(!) heavy-duty railcars for transport (in both HO and Z), the Biffisch (Biffi Schnable), a special car made to carry these products.  Märklin's 8620 transformer car is actually a schnable car; it is NOT a "Depressed Center Flat Car", it HAS no center, flat or otherwise - the load, a giant transformer in this case, or a nuclear reactor pressure vessel, bolts rigidly between the two pairs of transporter arms.  The arms are hydraulically-operated and can raise and lower the load, tilt it, and swing it outboard or inboard to accommodate tight curves.  When unladen, the arms bolt together to make a slightly-less-gigantic car.  The world's largest scales out to 1 meter (39") in HO and has 38 wheelsets (yes, I have a working HO mock-up)!

People are confused by my arbitrary compass directions; they seem reversed.  That's 'cause they ARE.  They are not points on a compass rose but rather the direction of travel on the line; "east" is moving left (up front), "north" is moving up (away from me), "west" is moving right (at the back), and "south" is moving down (towards me).

It suits me.

I'm adding direction arrows to my layout and drawings.

Older color photo of the entire Berlinerwerke-Z, taken before the "East" end was revised.  You can see the unnecessary bridges on the main, secondary, and loop tracks (I never did cut in the projected stream once the roundhouse and turntable wiped out the projected pond) and the extra 25mm space between the latter two.  Moving the secondary out toward the main gave anough room between it and the loop for the Boiler House, Restinghouse Rasthaus, Bright Moment Station, and the BW Security Dept.

Elgin Marbles got tucked in into that tiny space between the BW (Wintersdorf) station and the two adjacent diesel engine sheds.

There is no scenery whatsoever on the BW-Z and no one notices!

HELP!  Whazzit?

(Image colorized 04 Jun 2008)   (04 Jun 08)

All photos 1997 (except as noted) by and © S. Berliner, III 1997, 2003.

Two of my favored suppliers,

The Caboose for Märklin {closed 15 Dec 2002} and

The Mouse House for tiny cars, trucks, and the like: