Hopper car collection

In the 1980s, when still being a student, I was an active scratchbuilder of railway models. At the time, I made a series of German hopper cars from the 1920s and 1930s in TT scale (1:120). With shese hoppers, former German state railways started the development of the saddle-type design, which became the standard design for hopper cars in Europe. So, these early hoppers are the grandfathers of the modern European hopper cars, which are today known as the Fal type. However, on my later layouts, I could hardly use these cars, since they wouldn't fit to the rather rural settings. After they went out of service, German railway sold many of these historical hoppers to industrial railways for internal use. In particular, in steel mills and related industries, some of these pre-war era vehicles are still in daily use today. So, I got the idea to set up a photo scene in an industrial environment. The cars wear large four-digit ID numbers as it is typical practice on many industrial railways in Germany. The steam locomotive is also a scratchbuilt model I made in the 1980s. The prototype is a standard type made by Borsig in the 1930s and 1940s for industrial railways.

The photo for the background, I took in March 2017 in 751D-Park in Beijing, China. As a regular visitor of Beijing, I used photos of this former industrial area for the background of several of my pictures.