Neu Deting and Patzing is my 0 gauge finescale model railway layout set in Germany in the mid 1930s. Why, you may ask, an interest in the railways of Germany? I had a very successful career as a railway civil engineer, so a hobby based close to work did not appeal. From the early sixties I held an interest in railway photography and first visited West Germany’s railways in 1966. I returned each year until the end of steam and took an interest in the history of German steam locomotive development. Initially my plan was to build an H0 layout, however, visits to exhibitions in German lead to an interest in the bigger gauges of 0 and 1. After purchasing my first model built by Horst Schönlau in 0 gauge at an exhibition in Sinsheim in 2002 I caught the bug! Retirement and a house move in 2005 presented an opportunity for a layout. I was lucky as the house we purchased included a large garden outhouse that sat on the footprint of an old farmworker’s cottage. On my visits to Germany and 0 gauge exhibitions I got to know a small number of traders who helped me with plans for a layout. This help developed into a purchase of a layout that had been built in the loft of a home in Bavaria and was going to be broken up as the owner was moving to Northern Germany to retire.

I was a complete novice to model railway layouts, so the opportunity to purchase something built seemed too good to miss. The outhouse was insulated and prepared to be my model railway room. The German baseboards arrived in 2006 and became the central core to which I added my own boards to enable a complete oval to be built with passing loops and sidings so that two trains could run in opposite directions, albeit using a single line at each end. I added signals, scenery and backscenes. The original operating system was Lenz, which I have retained for my locos. Route setting, points and signals are controlled by MERG CBUS. Initially I designed one push button control panel for the outside track configuration, with two small DC control panels for each end of the inside “U” loop. More recently I have adopted PanelPro and a laptop! The highlight of the layout is a large 23 metre scale turntable and roundhouse.

The period I have chosen is mid 1930s. Following the merger of Germany’s state railways into the Reich railway in 1920 and into the Deutsche Reichsbahn in 1924 a programme of standard rolling stock designs was commenced. For the steam engines these were the “Einheitslokomotiven”. After WW2 many of these standard designs were rebuilt together with some new designs just as we did in the UK with the Riddles Standard classes. I decided that I would like models of the steam locomotives in their original condition, so Epoche 2 it was to be!

0 gauge in Germany is not as popular as it is here in the UK. Until this year ‘Arge Spur 0’ was the equivalent society to the Gauge 0 Guild, but with only 1000 members. Sadly, it is no more as the committee could not find volunteers to manage it going forward. The other difference in Germany is scale. We all think of 0 gauge as 1:43.5. Germany used that scale for brass ready to run models until 2016, when the brass r-t-r market adopted 1:45. Their track gauge is the same at 32 mm, so with 1:45 having been adopted by Lenz since 2007 the slightly larger scale has disappeared.

Sadly, Brexit has not been kind to those of us who model European railways. Nor to the Europeans who model the railways of the UK. Developing and building Patzing has been great fun over the last nearly 20 years. I hope those of you who have had the chance to watch Ian’s video enjoyed the brief glimpse it has given you. I haven’t done all of it myself, so thanks to Detlev, Frankie, Peter and Neil who chipped in over the years. Richard Spoors