Landscape and details in urban areas in Germany

Great Pictures Uwe! What an inspiration for modelling German cities. I now see what you mean about Leavenworth.

Jeremy

Uwe,

Thank you so much for the great photos! The variety of cobblestones is great. And with your foot in one photo I now know how to judge scale Details I find the most interesting, after the cobblestones, are light posts and stop lights, windows in all their variety, roof variations.

I really like the country road. If you have time in when the leaves come out on the trees, please take more country road photos.

Hello Beverly,
Hello Jeremy,

thank you for your kind words.

Beverly56 wrote:

with your foot in one photo I now know how to judge scale
[...]
I really like the country road. If you have time in when the leaves come out on the trees, please take more country road photos.

to place the foot in a picture was going to plan B since I forgot to take a ruler for the walk...

I will go out again when it is greener, but I wanted to get a chance at taking some pictures from the train while passing some villages before the trees and bushes have to much leaves and close the view. But then in Lübeck I took some pictures in the station, and when I boarded the train for the ride back my camera told me to reload the accu and did shut down. So I will have to go for the ride again soon with a better loaded accu...
But then I already saw some details that I want to show. For one of those I also can name a source to get it for Z-scale...


But I got some good pictures today. I will set up the best in a webpage, because then I can include them from there, and have more pictures in one posting.

@Jeremy:

This town couldn't look like Leavenworth because the theme there is Bavarian. And up here we are about as far as you can get away from Bavaria in Germany. For pictures from Bavaria Kelley is a little bit closer...

Uwe, I want to move. Thanks for the great pictures, so refreshing to see something other then half sided trees and iron ore dust.

Hello Terry,

yeah it's an nice area out here where other are coming for their vacations...

I just want to show one picture more for today, it's not the building, but the rolling stock I saw on a track today that I want to show.



Here you can see the last of the old doubledeck trains from the LBE: Lübeck-Büchener-Eisenbahn. Those trains were pulled by this engine back in the 1930 between Hamburg and Lübeck.
Behind it you can see the current workhorse for the small line traffic class 628 with a 928 car. Actually that is the current replacement for the good old "Schienenbus" VT98 which dominated those small lines all over Germany for many many years.

The station is the recently rebuild Lübeck mainstation. Originally made for the steam engines of the past a few years back the did tear the big hall down, cleaned all the old iron parts and replaced parts where necessary, and then did rebuild it in all its old glory. I will include more pictures in a later post.

I will be away tomorrow for Square Dancing. I'm back on Sunday.

Square Dancing - I would never have guessed. Unless it means something different where you are. I used to square dance as a kid. My parents and grandparents used to do that all the time. When my grandparents stopped travelling all over to square dance, we knew they were getting old!

Where you are might not be Bavarian, but the style is probably a lot closer than what we would try to accomplish here.

Cheers,
Jeremy

Uwe, it seems to me that it is very clean over there, no litter. I have to say that is something to be admired these days. Deirdre and I will be coming to Humburg some time in the future to see Wonderland. How far away are you? Would live to meet you and Kelley.

Hello Terry,
TerryH wrote:

Uwe, it seems to me that it is very clean over there, no litter. I have to say that is something to be admired these days. Deirdre and I will be coming to Humburg some time in the future to see Wonderland. How far away are you? Would live to meet you and Kelley.

Well, the station in Lübeck is still clean, but then the station is newly renovated as I wrote. In other places and stations you find mor litter, and graffity...

About the Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg...
...well, if I'm in a hurry and if it's not rush hour, I've done the way in 35 minutes... fortunately the police wasn't looking either...
Under normal circumstances I need about 50 minutes with the car, and mostly I just drive to the city limits of Hamburg and then use the subway. Takes more time, but saves you looking for parking spots in the city.

Kelley will need much more time to drive up to Hamburg. I think about 6 to7 hours...

My next visit there will be in May with some friends from Denmark. I hope to meet Gaston the bridgebuilder of the MiWuLa then. He really is a caracter of it's own. He also made a bridge in Z-scale for a another member of our Hamburg Z-scale module group.

@Jeremy: Square Dancing yesterday was much fun. Much more then 1000 dancers, and the Deputy Chief of the American embassy in Berlin held a nice tale for the dancers. And yes, Square Dancing here is the same as in the US, except maybe that the average age is somewhat lower. I start feeling belonging to the oldsters at 49 years. I've been to the 43rd National in Portland, OR in 1994 and the 50th in Anaheim, CA in 2001 too.

Thanks for the great photos Uwe. I spent a few days in Lubeck in June 2007 - what a fantastic place! It's good to see that the Hbf upgrade has finished and I believe that the electrification of the line from Hamburg has been completed too. I have a photo of a Br 218 at Hamburg Hbf with a set of double-deck cars behind it that I'd just travelled there from Lubeck on. I didn't realise at the time that it wasn't going to be too long before trains like that would be a thing of the past.

Hello Gary,
ausman2001 wrote:

It's good to see that the Hbf upgrade has finished and I believe that the electrification of the line from Hamburg has been completed too. I have a photo of a Br 218 at Hamburg Hbf with a set of double-deck cars behind it that I'd just travelled there from Lubeck on. I didn't realise at the time that it wasn't going to be too long before trains like that would be a thing of the past.

Yes the station is finished now, and also the electrification is done. The bridge on the left from the station in this map had to be rebuild completly, because the bridge was to low for the catenary wires. Google maps still shows the station under work here.

About the double-deck cars:
The green yellow one I showed in my picture is the only existing set from the 1930s. But those double-deck cars that you saw in Hamburg are the newest generation of this kind of cars. And they are still in use:

They are also available from Maerklin in Z: 87291 / 87292 / 87293. Those cars are just marked for another area.

Gary...
I forgot to ask...
ausman2001 wrote:

I spent a few days in Lubeck in June 2007 - what a fantastic place!

was that you who parked his car here :


Have fun...
...and next time you are in Lübeck, we'll have a beer somewhere ...

Uwe

No, it wasn't me!

Lubeck is one of those places that's small and compact enough that you don't need a car. In any case Germans, like most foreigners, drive on the wrong side of the road and you can't imagine how offputting that is!

Thanks for the invitation

PS: Thanks for the info re the double deck cars. Are those LBE cars green and yellow? They look grey in the photo.

Hello Gary,
ausman2001 wrote:

Lubeck is one of those places that's small and compact enough that you don't need a car.

And it is a real p... i. t.. a.. to drive in the city. So I always park in that parking garage, when I'm in Lübeck for shopping.

In any case Germans, like most foreigners, drive on the wrong side of the road and you can't imagine how offputting that is!

Well, as we see it we're driving on the right side, since we're driving on the right side of the road...

...and yes, I know how hard it is for the neck since you always look to the wrong side first when you want to cross a street. Been in London, and I thanked God (or the painters) for the painted words on the streets "Look left" at the crossings in London.

Thanks for the invitation

Did you use the link under the panoramic view of the Brauberger? It shows some panoramic views of the medivial cellar of the house. If you're there with a group you can order a barrel of beer with 10 or 15 or 20 liters for your board. Beats the Hofbräuhaus in Munich every time...

Are those LBE cars green and yellow? They look grey in the photo.

Yes you're right, I must have had a green shade over my glasses somehow....
I'm not sure how long those cars will be there. They belong to a membership corporation who also uses the cars for tours. You can also rent the cars for an event like a wedding or a birthday party or whatever else you want. It can seat about 170 people, and it has a bar in the lower deck. The track it is standing on right now is a track ending in the station.

Uwe,

Thank you for the GPS cooridnates from another thread and for the link to Lubbock. In both instances, I was able to travel around. I am getting a better understanding of German cities as well as for Europe as a whole. I keep going back to the links you provided to look around to see all the sights

Hello Beverly,

Do you use also Google Earth? It is faster then Google maps, but I it is easier to provide a link from Google Maps for a posting. I will try to provide cooordinates and links for my pictures.

Well, its 23:20 now, and I will go to bed for tonight. Just one picture, it is a house with a thatched roof, unfortunately not in the best condition:


this house is standing here at 53°45'10"N 10°43'43"E for Google Earth.

There used to be a restaurant in that house and the other beside it. Unfortunatey it is out of business right now...

Uwe,

I use Google Maps.

I like the green moss on the thatched roof, but perhaps the moss abosrbs the water instead of letting the thatch hlep the water drip off the roof?

Thank you for the links. What is the name of the body of water at the last link you provided?

Hello Berverly,
Beverly56 wrote:

I like the green moss on the thatched roof, but perhaps the moss abosrbs the water instead of letting the thatch hlep the water drip off the roof?

the moss holds the water much longer, and therefore the risk of rot in the roof is bigger.

What is the name of the body of water at the last link you provided?

it's the Ratzeburger See
You can choose between different languages for the wikipedia article in the lower left of the menue...
Unfortunately the most information is on the "normal" German site. The lake is about 10km long, and was formed at the end of the last ice age. The lake is also very deep with up to 24 meter.
In summer lot's of sailboats are cruising on the lake. Sometimes if the weather permits I go canoeing on the lake, but if the weather change it can get rough in a hurry...

Ah, Ratzeburg. What a little gem of a place It's worth going there just to see the beautiful old cathedral.

Hello Gary,
ausman2001 wrote:

Ah, Ratzeburg. What a little gem of a place It's worth going there just to see the beautiful old cathedral.

Well, I have to admit that you're right...

...even if I'm not from Ratzeburg . My hometown is Mölln (as always, try the different language versions in wikipedia).

Now I'm living here (the red house in the middle at 53°34'23.25"N 10°40'42.4"E).

To get back to the topic: here you can see my childhood home (the house number is wrong, because Google maps is wrong by two digits...). The satellite view shows the backyards of those houses. Today those backyards are mostly lawn, but in my youth we had a vegetable garden instead. The use of those backyards is changeing over time, earlier in time they gave a big surplus for the kitchen of the people.

Those real estates were drawn in 1935. Today the real estate areas are smaller. Back then we had 1000 sqm, while today the average is about 600sqm.

Thanks Uwe, this is all very interesting. The size of house blocks has had a similar decline in Sydney over the years.

I was also interested to see the reference to Till Eulenspiegel, and that he died from the plague. From memory in Richard Strauss's tone poem he came to a bad end!