Every now and then our readers themselves get so excited with BMR that they send in their own articles. This is of course something we really appreciate, so please keep them coming! Today it’s Enrico Lussi’s turn, who has written an article about his MILS layout “NeuKirche”. You might have already seen his layout before in our coverage of Legoworld 2018, but today he will give some more insight to how this layout came to light. Enjoy, and thank you Enrico for this entry! Please feel free to keep them coming!

Introducing Enrico

Well I can’t believe I’m actually writing a post for BMR! What a honor. First I would like to introduce myself. My name is Enrico, 18 years old and currently studying to become a civil engineer at the University of Applied Sciences in Rotterdam. I have been building 1:45 scale trains for the last 3 years (could be 3,5 already). My passion is history and especially train related history. So I build a lot of steam locomotives and historic railway wagons.

My current collection is 7 steam locomotives, 4 diesels, 1 Intercity train (ICM 4001), 2 diner wagons, 1 postal wagon, 2 passenger wagons, 5 closed freight wagons and 4 flatbeds. My biggest project is my Bahnsbetriebswerk. In this article I would like to take you through the design and building project. I hope you enjoy this article as much as I did building my layout!

Bahnsbetriebswerk NeuKirche, building a “home” for my steam locomotive

For this article we need to get in our time machines and travel back to the long gone days of 2017. In the summer of 2017, for the first time I attended several ‘simple’ Lego conventions on my own. Until that time, I had always joined other peoples layouts, I would just bring my MOC trains. Not that this was in any way unpleasant, because I had the honor to attended a lot of amazing layouts, like the Amsterdam Centraal Station by Dutch builder Silvio, and Martijn van der Linde’s (he is also Dutch btw) wonderful modular France-inspired station (see below). However, not having your own layout means you always have to play by somebody else’s rules, which can be a bit of a problem if you build 8 wide German steam engines, while the reference cadre of your buddies is a 6 wide Metroliner…

My steam locomotives always looked somewhat out of place on those shared layouts, definitely by the ‘real’ Model Railroaders that would sometimes attend these conventions. For this, one first needs to understand how the European Railway Modellers categorize the different era’s in railway history: By Epoches. Every Epoche reflects a particular time within railroading history. The idea is that you can build whatever you want, as long as it makes sense within that epoche (or one below or above), because the chance of prototypical railroading would be highest, ie. the chance that two trains, or buildings, or cars, would have been able to ‘meet’, would be the highest if we follow these rules.  For the AFOLs out there that don’t know the Epoche system I hope this explains:

To clarify my statement: The layouts I joined where build in Epoche VI, but to be honest, most of my locomotives and wagons are from Epoche III-IV. When visitors asked about this, I always gave the “museum” argument: My locomotives are used by a Rail Heritage museum, and they use them in Epoch VI (which is definitely true for my MOC’s: All of them are decommissioned and Rail Heritage owned). However, that answer never seemed to fully stratify both the visitor nor me.

So there were 2 problems on my plate: I always relied on somebody else’s layout to be able to attend a show, and my locomotives are kind of out of place on most of these layouts. After a few hard brainstorm sessions I decided to finally do a proper layout. Well, maybe it wasn’t that I needed these brainstorm sessions to decide, because I always had plans for a layout, it was more I just wasn’t able to figure out the How and When. And since I was faced with these terrible problems, it was time to take a few old ideas out of the vault.

To be fully clear, my first idea never was to build a Bahnsbetriebswerk and it definitely wasn’t planned to be something as huge as it is now. I started with something simple, a station, a typical German station that would be located at a museum line (If you want to know why it should be German even though I’m Dutch, I’d say just hold your horses a bit longer, it will all make sense after the next paragraph). It would consist of a small platform where people could wait to get on the train to take them on a small trip on the museum line, which most of the time would be the layout that I would attended at that moment. Besides the platform there would be a small water tower and a signal house. With this I didn’t need somebody else his layout for my trains, and I could even keep it stand-alone, in which cases I of course wouldn’t be able to let my engines run, but at least I could show them off in a proper historic setting, ie. in Epoche IV.

For the construction I mainly used the MILS-system, however I’m using 48*48 baseplates instead of the ‘regular’ 32*32. The reason for this is that I find it easier to work with 48×48 since you are able to place double track with a good size platform on 1 baseplate, as shown below. Also, in my opinion it’s easier to carry the layout around this way. Oh, and it’s less work setting up the whole thing, which is quite handy if you attend as many weekend events as I do.

As you guys might have noticed I build a lot of German trains and scenery. As said I’m a Dutchie and not German. But why do I then build so many German trains and scenery? Well there’s a good reason for that. Besides that German engineering is superior (in my eyes at least), the Netherlands was one of the first countries to decommission steam locomotives, and the first one that actually ended all steam powered trains, as early as January 1958 in fact!  In these first two decades after the war there wasn’t so much of a historic scene in Europe, therefore you can almost count the amount of Dutch steam locomotives that aren’t scrapped on two hands. However, Germany decommissioned steam locomotives almost 20 years later than we did, in September 1977. In those years, the opinion towards preserving steam engines had changed 180 degrees, so a lot of train enthusiast used this moment to bring German steam locomotives to the Netherlands to create steam locomotives museum here. Let’s just say that thanks to this, I don’t know any better than that European Steam Engines are German 😉

Inspiration

I am a huge fan of the Dutch steam locomotives museums and I’m even a regular sponsor to a few of them. There are 2 which I find really interesting: The SSN and the VSM.

The SSN (Stoom Stichting Nederland, The organization for running Steam in the Netherlands) is located in Rotterdam. I live close to Rotterdam and I have visited the SSN since I was 2,5 years old (I am not kidding, I have pictures!). The SSN doesn’t have their own dedicated track to run their locomotives on, it only has a steam depot which is located at the main Railway line between Rotterdam and Gouda . Their goal is to preserve old steam locomotives for the next generation and organize special train rides in the Netherlands and Germany.

The VSM (Veluwsche Stoomtrein Maatschapij, Veluwsche Steamtrain organisation) on the other hand maintains an old train line from Apeldoorn to Dieren in one of our nation parks. It might sounds strange for some people that there is a steam train running through a national park, but believe me it creates an amazing train journey that I took for more times than I can remember. Their train collection is huge, the biggest in The Netherlands and maybe one of the bigger ones in Europe, which is even more impressive if you realize that the VSM isn’t a static museum and has a mission statement to try to have all their stock in running condition! The VSM organizes historic train rides on their own line and sometimes special rides through the Netherlands.

The SSN and VSM are thus my get-to places for inspiration, but it doesn’t stop there! I am lucky that my Father was a train enthusiast to, so I have visited museums across the globe.

My small station was based on one of the stations the VSM has on their railway line. But after it was finished I wasn’t satisfied with the size of it. It was fun and great to have at shows, but I wanted something bigger, so I decided to go back to the drawing board. And then it struck me. A Bahnsbetriebswerk! To fully understand why this made perfect sense for me, I think it’s better if I first explain what a Bahnsbetriebswerk is before I go into further details about the layout itself.

Bahnsbetriebswerk

A Bahnsbetriebswerk is the German equivalent of a railway depot. But since its German it’s bigger, and more efficient. A Bahnsbetriebswerk (Bhw for short) comes in different sizes and with different functions, but most of them have at least some type of turntable with an engine shed or roundhouse. Mostly they also house a few factories, the obvious storage and cranes for coal and of course water towers. So, in short, a Bhw houses everything a locomotive needs to be able to fully function as a main line steam engine.  

The SSN and VSM both have railway depots that you would be able to call a Bhw and a lot of German Railway museum are housed in old Bhw, so inspiration wasn’t that hard to come by!

But where to start? A major feature of any Bhw or Railway depot is the turntable. So, I decided to first start working on a turntable that would get a prominent feature in my Bhw. In total I have built 5 versions with the first 2 being motorized.  However, the biggest problem with motorizing the turntable was that I was still building in the MILS standard, and that my engines are so heavy that it would need a lot of power. After the first attempt I decided to give up the MILS standard and go for MILS+ 1 brick in height. After the second attempted left me with broken technic parts and a lot of frustration I decided to build a “dummy” version with the ability to motorize it sometime in the future.

Next up were the Coal bunker and crane. I must admit, my inspiration for the Coal Bunker came from a design I saw over at Ebay. I modified the design a little bit to make it more modular so that it’s easier to move to conventions, but overall, I decided to keep his shapes.

Then , while on Holiday in Germany, it struck me. I was missing big piece! And by big, I mean a shed/workplace that could house several engines. You know, a proper place locomotives and wagons can be restored, repaired and more. I was visiting the Technik-Museum Speyer, an amazing museum and city. The museum has trains, boats, airplanes bicycle, Space shuttle and more! I recommend a visit. But one of their warehouse/sheds really stood out. It was an amazing old factory I guess, but you could instantly see it as an Engine shed. The colours where beautiful and the details really struck out. The moment I saw it, I knew I ,I wanted to build sometime similar to that wonderful building. It would be placed at my turntable where 3 tracks would go from the turntable into the Engine shed. I really like TrixBrix and one of their products is a train adapter where you can go from 12v to RC track. Those would be perfect to make a grease pit, something I think is a must-have for any Engine shed. The color scheme would  also be based on the old factory at Speyer: Medium Dark Flesh with Dark Red.

LegoWorld 2018

As you might have understood from the Lego World 2018 report that Raised wrote I am part of the Lego World 8-wide crew. However, we had some difficulties fitting in my Bhw last year, so it got placed on the end of the table. However, I don’t want to go into more details here since Raised already did that, but I do want to mention that the reactions were great! And I got a lot of good feedback from my fellow crew mates. The Bhw gave not only my steam locomotives a “home” and great setup to show them, but also a reason for them to be driving on the main railway line.

One of most heard pieces of feedback was that it looked a bit cramped. And I couldn’t agree more. So, a few months after LegoWorld I started to expand, adding an extra track and platform for the station, and building a new switch tower. Also, I have expanding the coal bunker and coal tower to create a more realistic coal loading area.

1,5 years later (ie. ‘now’)

This brings me to the current day, 1,5 years after having started building. Today my Bhw is 8 48*48 baseplates long and 3 48*48 baseplates wide, obviously a huge layout for a student like me, and something I would have never imagined that it would get to 1,5 year ago. I attended a lot of conventions with the Bhw and has been featured in a lot of articles, videos interviews and more, but I’m for sure not done yet! For example, here are some pictures for the latest convention that I attended.

So, what’s next?

There are still a lot of things I still should finish and there are also a lot of plans to go even bigger! Things that I still need to finish are the roof of my shed (This one has high priority according to my crewmates), making the turntable functional and of course a station building. Just like last year we will be attending Lego world with the whole crew, and again we are trying to go bigger than previous year. I don’t want to give away too much, but I am planning to connect the Bahnsbetriebswerk with the main railway line, and I want to make a museum line. Plans are mostly finished by now, but not totally set in stone yet. However, the show is only in October, so I have more than enough time on my hands to keep on fiddling with this!

So, that’s it for the moment. I hope to be able to write an update in the future of my Bahnsbetriebswerk. For now, thanks for reading and keep on building! If you want to see more, you can check out my Flickr, but I also have a Facebook page where I tend to post updates.  

End credits

Lastly, I would like to thank the BMR team for letting me write this article for their page, it’s truly is an honor for me. I especially want to thank Raised for all the great advice and help and of course Martijn, a great friend of mine, without whom I would never have been able to come as far as I am now.