There are those who love to play and collect model trains of various types, scales and colors. Then, there are those who want to follow and stay true to the prototypes in the real world. In between, there are those of us who just want our fantasy to run wild. Welcome to the beautiful world of model railroading!

My personal preference and tendency is towards a particular theme (trying very hard to stay within a theme, if you know what I mean. Resistance is kinda futile when you are spoiled with choices in a massive second-hand, pre-owned market). Firstly, with a “limited” budget and not to overspend (cough, ahem), having a theme makes sure you buy models that fit in. Secondly, a theme helps with your model railroading especially in deciding the era, scene and operating compan(ies) that you want to model. In short, FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS.

Well, when I started with Märklin late 2021, I wanted (and still do) model steam era especially Era II and early Era III. You can see that my fleet register shows mostly locomotives, passenger and freight cars from these periods. Probably, the only non-prototypical things about my models are the choice of livery and colorful-advertisements (?). Instead of black and red steam locomotives, I went for photographic grey or silver livery and most 2-axle freight cars with colorful present-day advertisements. Oh well, why not.

While I still stick to steam era as a core modelling theme, I got excited with a modern era (Era VI) railroad operating company in Munich, Germany. RailAdventure is a railroad special transport company. They positioned themselves as interim operator i.e. providing rail operation between rollout of new rail vehicles and start of rail operations.

Their livery makes an eye-catching sight among us railroad and model railroading fans as well as Loco Buggy, an innovative solution to transport standard and non-standard gauge rail vehicles on standard gauge tracks.

In fact, my first encounter with this company was during a repair shop visit in Frankfurt. The name and livery caught my eyes and been finding out more about them. As someone who specialises and consults in digital maintenance for rail vehicles, I am fascinated and would like to model the whole value-added chain from rail transport (such as RailAdventure) to repair shop (considering a diorama)

Check out my dedicated germaN87AC RailAdventure page for more information and updates. Thank you RailAdventure for supporting us model railroaders in depicting your rolling stocks and mimicking your operations on our layouts.