Spring is usually the season for visiting club meetings and exhibitions.
In April we went to the Intermodellbau Exhibition in Dortmund at the invitation of the Dampfmodellbau‑Freunde NRW. In May we visited Stoomgroep Turnhout in Belgium, the Spoorwegmuseum Utrecht (Dutch Railway museum), and last weekend we travelled to Nienoord Spoorwegen in Leek (Groningen).
Meeting up with fellow model engineers and running the locomotives is always a pleasure.
Below are some photos of these meetings. As you can see, the model engineering hobby is about much more than constructing and building locomotives in the workshop — it is also a social activity and, of course, about playing with the trains.
The Intermodellbau exhibition at Dormund
Turnhout Belgium
Dutch National Railway museum Utrecht
With a small delegation we visited the Railway Museum in Utrecht, where we enjoyed a day full of railway history and inspiration.
In front of an un‑rebuilt NS 1100 class locomotive. In 1985 I did an internship at the railway workshops in Tilburg, where I used to work on these locomotives — much younger then, of course.
In the museum you can find the workshop of former model engineer Jan Groot, who was a member of our model engineering society Stoomgroep Zuid. After his death, his models and complete workshop were donated to the museum as a tribute to the model engineering side of the railways.
The builders plate of the NS 3737. The last steam locomotive of the Dutch railways in 1958
In front of the NS3737
Going into technical details of course.
De Arend, a 1939 replica of the first Dutch locomotive from 1839, originally built in England for the opening of the Amsterdam–Haarlem line.
Nienoord, Leek
The International Steam Meetings at Leek used to be the biggest event in the Netherlands, where steam enthusiasts from all over Europe came together. For more than 40 years, it was the event to attend, and it is where I met many fellow model engineers whom I still know to this day. After the coronavirus pandemic and a change in management, the event ceased to exist.
The track layout has changed considerably in recent years, and a new roundhouse has been built. It looks very nice and clean. A 10¼‑inch gauge track has also been added, where two NS 3700 models run to a timetable on Sunday only. They were built by Balson of Switzerland.
We were invited to run our locomotives on Saturday, the 13th of June. It is a nice track, but because much of the line is single track, you often have to wait quite a while before you can enter one of the loop sections. At the north end there is a loop, and at the south end there is a turntable. To shorten the waiting time there, we coupled up back‑to‑back with the Tigerli. With a locomotive on both ends of our train, we could run back and forth without having to wait for the turntable.
