Critique Welcomed H Block, Speicherstadt, Hamburg

[Bill Watts]

Hamburg is a very picturesque city. This is the former warehouse district which now houses museums, art galleries, restaurants and the largest model railway in the world.

Camera: Zenza Bronica SQ-Ai, 80mm f2.8 PS lens, SQ AE metering prism, SQ winder. Exposure by metering prism, aperture priority, average weighting.
Exposure details: f11, 1/250s
Film: FujiFilm Neopan Acros (original, expired 12/2011, Frozen since purchase)
Processed in Ilford Ilfotec DD-X, 1+4, 7'13" @ 24°C. Fixed with ilford Rapid fixer 1+4, 5'.
Scanned: Plustek OpticFilm 120 Mk I @ 2560 DPI. Original size 5733 x 5733 pixels reduced to 1000 x 1000 for display here.
Inversion and slight adjustments made in Affinity Photo 2

 

[Gary R. Smith]

Nice image!
Since you mention the model trains, how does the layout compare to the one in Deutsche Museum? I was there years ago and thought it was a great museum in general and I liked their train layout. I believe they have a live video feed from one of the model trains (at least they did). My dad made me a great multi-track layout in the late 1950's. I could control the switches from "my" control board. It was quite the model for less expensive Marx trains we had. Pop built a paper mache landscape and he often customized the rolling stock and engine livery.

 

[Bill Watts]

Nice image!
Since you mention the model trains, how does the layout compare to the one in Deutsche Museum? I was there years ago and thought it was a great museum in general and I liked their train layout. I believe they have a live video feed from one of the model trains (at least they did). My dad made me a great multi-track layout in the late 1950's. I could control the switches from "my" control board. It was quite the model for less expensive Marx trains we had. Pop built a paper mache landscape and he often customized the rolling stock and engine livery.

Thanks

Miniatur Wunderland is in a block to the right of the picture behind the block you can see on the right. There is a canal running between the blocks. Miniatur Wunderland occupies two floors of the block and a further floor in the block across the canal accessed by a glass bridge with model trains running through the floor! They have modelled various areas of the world and have a working port and airport where aircraft land, take of and taxi to and from the airport buildings - all modelled in H0. quoting from Wikipedia, the article which is now a couple of years old:-

"The exhibition includes around 1,120 digitally controlled trains with more than 10,000 wagons. The Wonderland is also designed with around 4,300 houses and bridges, more than 10,000 vehicles – of which around 350 drive independently on the installation – 52 airplanes and around 290,000 figures. The system features a recurring day-night lighting cycle and almost 500,000 built-in LED lights. Of the 7,000 m2 (75,347 sq ft) of floorspace, the models occupies 1,545 m2 (16,630 sq ft).

As of December 2021, the railway consisted of 16,138 m (52,946 ft) of track in H0 scale, divided into nine sections: Harz mountains, the fictitious town of Knuffingen, the Alps and Austria, Hamburg, the United States, Scandinavia, Switzerland, a replica of Hamburg Airport, Italy and South America. Planning is also in progress for the construction of sections for Central America and the Caribbean, Asia, England, Africa and The Netherlands."

Brazil and the Caribbean have since been completed and are open to the public, as has Monaco, complete with the F1 Grand Prix, the cars race with a random winner and no visible tracks. Cars are free to overtake one another whilst racing. That track took 6 years to develop and cost thousands of Euros.

It is in the Guinness book of records as the largest model railway in the world.

I have ambitions for a model railway, but perhaps not on such a grandiose scale! I have rolling stock and locos and have built a DCC++ EX control system running JMRI as control software on a Raspberry Pi 4.When complete it will be fully automated.

It is a case of finding the space and time!

 

[Gary R. Smith]

It is a case of finding the space and time!

It seems that those two commodities seem to impact EVERYTHING!

 

[Brian Moore]

This image is, to me, evocative of what I think a tiny bit of Germany may have looked like in the mid-1930s. It's beautiful, Bill. (You sure keep a lot of details about your exposures. Thanks for that.)

 

[Bill Watts]

This image is, to me, evocative of what I think a tiny bit of Germany may have looked like in the mid-1930s. It's beautiful, Bill. (You sure keep a lot of details about your exposures. Thanks for that.)

Except it probably would have been a lot grubbier!