S-Bahnhof Engelscher Markt, Berlin

[railsquid]

And painted:

 

engelscher-markt-2022-10-02_01 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

Needs a bit of touching up and weathering next.

[railsquid]

While that is ongoing, work has been carried out on the little elongated triangle of grass'n'stuff:

 

engelscher-markt-2022-10-09_01 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

Fence not yet fixed in place properly as it needs a bit of touching up as well.

 

Talking of fences, the viaduct side fencing, which looks somewhat wonky here, is being fixed in place gradually with the aid of some very short pieces of 1mm brass rodding and down the other end now looks like this:

 

engelscher-markt-2022-10-09_02 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

Edited October 9, 2022 by railsquid

[railsquid]

So the other week I picked up this Tomytec bus stop set:

 

 

with a view to some surgery, and also (related to this picture😞

On 9/27/2022 at 1:01 PM, chadbag said:

The advert on the front of the tram in the link is interesting.  "Gorbachev Vodka." ("Wodka Gorbatschow")

 

On 9/27/2022 at 1:08 PM, railsquid said:

Yeah, it was very heavily marketed at the time, but it's not named after that Gorbachev: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wodka_Gorbatschow

 

after much cutting, insertion of pieces of brass rod, glue, painting, and some printing:

 

engelscher-markt-2022-10-18_02 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

a reasonable approximation of a 1990s Berlin tram stop shelter, complete with Berlin map, and period "Wodka Gorbatschow" advertising, which I scanned in from a magazine I've been keeping around for over 30 years in the hope it would be useful.

[bill937ca]

Awh, Kato 24-076 roadside trees. Just used the last of mine the other night.

[railsquid]

On 10/2/2022 at 11:51 AM, railsquid said:

And painted:

 

engelscher-markt-2022-10-02_01 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

Needs a bit of touching up and weathering next.

 

Meanwhile work is ongoing to transform the classic Tomix mid-Showa commerical building on the left into something which could pass for a late 19th century structure which not look out of place in industrial central Europe:

 

engelscher-markt-2022-12-22_01 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

Mainly by painting it and modifying the windows to prototypical for the kind of industrial/commercial building one might find in such a location, i.e. divided up into more panes. Painstaking, but somehow satisfying.

Edited December 23, 2022 by railsquid

[Kamome]

That original red brick kind of reminds me of the top tiers of the firehouse in Ghostbusters. 

 

The brown looks much better and the windows look very in-keeping.

Just needs some grime from trains going past. I bet the occupants/maintenance firm feel like they’re living in Santorini having to paint the brick edging white every few months. 

[railsquid]

Grime and decay to be added, bear in mind this building is theoretically located in the early 1990s in the former East Berlin and was probably last renovated well before the Red Army marched in and tried to finish off what years of Allied bombing raids left standing. Not sure how to model a "sprayed with machine gun bullets" effect though (there was a lot of that about in the early 1990s still).

[Sean]

This looks really fantastic.Its impressive the way you’ve been able to “Germanize” those Japanese structures.

 

I have been making plans for a a German N gauge layout to go next to my Japanese one someday too. I lived in West Germany from 1985 to 1989 and my dad and I built one back then. Recently I’ve been picking up some Faller and Vollmer structures that have been popping up on Yahoo Auctions, but don’t have the space to buildit yet…

 

 

[railsquid]

And all the windows "complete":

 

engelscher-markt-2023-01-07_01 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

Looks OK from a distance, which is from where it will be viewed normally.

 

In the intervening period I also managed to make a road under the bridge and add bits of missing brickwork.

Edited January 7, 2023 by railsquid

[railsquid]

Before:

 

commercial-building-1 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

After:

 

commercial-building-6 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

[Cat]

On 12/23/2022 at 2:52 AM, railsquid said:

Not sure how to model a "sprayed with machine gun bullets" effect though (there was a lot of that about in the early 1990s still).

Ah, I missed this before.  I've done that sort of thing on cars for Mad Max style tabletop games.
 
I put a straight pin in a clothes pin, heat it over a candle, and stab the plastic to make the bullet holes.

 

[cteno4]

Ah yes my childhood making 1/72 military vehicles with my best friend and then having pea gravel battles and then fixing up the damaged vehicles as “repaired” and adding hot needle bullet holes.

 

jeff

[railsquid]

Here we see the now-abandoned (East) Berlin office of VEB Robotron Elektronik Riesa, one-time purveyor of home computers and other computery bits to the masses and to industry:

 

commercial-building-9 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

commercial-building-10 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

I have no idea whether they actually had a Berlin office (unlikely), but if they did it would probably looked something like that in the early 1990s. Anyway the sign was on a sheet of pre-unification German posters and signs and fitted just nicely.

[railsquid]

And a little bit more work on the bridge area to round off the night:

 

]

engelscher-markt-2023-01-14_03 by [url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/railsquid/]Rail Squid[/url], on Flickr

 

 

[bill937ca]

Is that Japan in the distance? 😁

[railsquid]

If you mean the 0-Series Shinkansen, it's a little-known fact that in an attempt to acquire its own high-speed train, the DR acquired some surplus units from Japan, though the experiment was ultimately unsuccessful.

[railsquid]

Slightly different perspective:

 

engelscher-markt-2023-01-15_01 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

The new Faller viaduct arch window inserts unfortunately make the viaduct sections no longer flush with the supporting structure, so took the opportunity to cut some holes to that a) they fit b) at a later stage I can add hints of interiors if the mood takes me. For now I'll just black them out for that empty unused look.

[railsquid]

This could easily be Leipzig as well, I suppose...

 

engelscher-markt-2023-01-15_02 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

[Beaver]

Just about the least touristy view of Germany imaginable. It looks like the sort of thing people who compose guidebooks etc are specifically instructed not to include!

[railsquid]

Clearly you never owned the 1991 Lonely Planet Berlin Guide, which I did, and I am pretty sure I kept the cover, and am now trying to locate...

 

I just wish I'd had the courage to afford a camera at the time and had been able to take lots of photos.

[railsquid]

Viaduct arch window facades installed:

 

engelscher-markt-2023-01-16_01 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

I should note I painted them "iron black", as they come in a plasticky green colour.

[railsquid]

How it started:

 

The future "Engelscher Markt" in 2016 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

How it's going:

 

engelscher-markt-2023-01-20_01 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

[railsquid]

Time for some real Berlin S-Bahn action:

 

engelscher-markt-2023-01-21_02 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

Also constructing this tram stop sign in the style of the early 1990s:

 

engelscher-markt-2023-01-21_01 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

[railsquid]

Not much visible progress this week, most of my modelling energy has been consumed by a) fixing the layout electrical supply and b) ongoing work on a Pola building kit, but I did manage to decorate the front of one of the newspaper/magazine store with some reasonably in-period advertising which came with the Faller viaduct kits:

 

engelscher-markt-2023-01-29_01 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

A next task would be to locate some Berlin-specific newspaper ads and integrate them into the scene.

 

(Random anecdote: my first two years in Berlin were paid for mainly by selling newspapers in the evening in pubs and cafes; Saturday evenings were particularly good as the Sunday edition with jobs and apartment ads was highly sought-after and I could usually clear 100DM with less than 2 hours work).

[railsquid]

Actually while I'm tripping down Memory Lane, here's a photo of a tram in Berlin:

 

P1020952 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

and the building with the red-brown frontage immediately to the left of the tram mirror is where I resided from 1995 to 1999 (though it was an ugly brown then; random random anecdote: the white building behind the tram was the residence of Johannes R. Becher, responsible for the text of the GDR national anthem); not visible is the tram loop which goes right past it, but if you look at this picture at maximum resolution in Flickr you can just about see the overhead wires:

 

P1020954 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

and some of the kind of shunting activity I could see from the comfort of my unrenovated kitchen window. There was a lot more visible, sadly I don't have any photos, but here's one I found from the 1970s which shows the general expanse of railway which once existed (arrow points to the apartment where I lived):

 

warschauer-strasse-wohnung by Rail Squid, on Flickr

Edited January 29, 2023 by railsquid