Back with the Passenger

Greetings dear listener.

I’ve returned to the layout after an absence of a few months but have not been completely idle, for my ebay and bargain-hunting fingers have been toiling over a hot keyboard in the interim to procure a number of goodies that were unpacked this morning.

One of these items is a Swiss passenger train - Marklin’s SBB Eurocity set, “87662”. 

This is a set of 4 cars, which are supposedly: one 1st class car, one 1st class panorama car and two 2nd class vehicles. The set is presented in the ‘previous’ SBB carriage livery of white, black and grey, whereas the current cars lose the grey and look very smart in their black and white with flashes of red; with a little yellow as required to signify first class.

First impressions: These are pretty neat, especially the panorama car which I think is rather nicely done and matches the prototype well. One thing that really stands out with the set, as you may see above in comparison with one of the red hopper wagons that you’ve seen in previous posts, is that they are really, really, really long, so they do look a bit silly on tight curves. 

I thought these red tarp-topped cars below were pretty long, but they seem tiny in comparison. I’ll have to be careful when trains pass each other on curves!

As for the prototype, the real InterRegio trains usually have six cars or more, but four seems to be (literally) an uphill struggle for a single Z scale Re 4/4 (although one of the cars seems a little less free-rolling that the others), four it will be for now. 

The real trains usually have a 4/4 or sometimes an Re 460 on the head, with the occasional appearance of two 4/4s, which if run on the model would enable me to haul 6 or 7 cars if I was to find another set cheaply and sell the extras, as the real trains only have one pano car regardless of length, and on the Gotthard it always seems to be located second car from the north end of the train.

During peak periods (August summer holidays and ski weekends for example) the train can be a almost a dozen cars long, often filled out with older green cars, as can be seen behind the Re 460 picture at Wassen in the previous post.

At the real Wassen, there is northbound/downhill InterRegio train that goes through the station at :20 past the hour and an uphill at about :45. Other Inter City passenger services are provided by Pendolino derivatives of varying aesthetic appeal.

You can see the obvious black and white with red flashes look in the pictures below vs the grey on the models above.

There are a few things I’d like to do to improve these cars, with the most obvious being to get rid of those grey stripes. Other than the Pano car, I don’t know whether the other three are really models of SBB prototypes or (as seems quite common with Marklin) if they’re German cars repainted in Swiss livery. Certainly looking at the prototype pics, there are too many ‘opening’ windows and various details that seem a bit off (those grills in the middle of the 2nd class cars for example) but time will tell whether I care enough about these details to go changing them. We’ll save that for an upcoming instalment.