From “Steel Rails to Victory” by Ron Ziel
Roco Minitanks German 88mm $24.08
REI flatcars with with SP anti-aircraft gun loads. The least expensive a Wirbelwind $89.95
Available at Reynaulds Euro Imports link in earlier post in this trhread.
I think a copy of the previously mentioned “Steel Rails to Victory” would be a good guide.
http://www.alibris.com/booksearch.detail?S=R&bid=9267522921&cm_mmc=shopcompare-_-base-_-nonisbn-_-na
As the above posted pictures show, the US Army had quite a railway operation in Europe in WWII. (They still have some reserve rail units.)
They acquired numerous steam locomotives from US builders for use in Europe. These were built with European coupler systems and to conform to European clearances. Most common was a hand fired 2-8-0 design. At least two survive in the US. One at the Army Transportation Museum at Ft. Eustis, Virginia and the other operational on a tourist line in the south.
The Army had to get the European railroads back up and running as they advanced to move the supplies. They used Railway Operating Batallions. A Batallion had three companies: “A” company was maintenance of way and bridges, “B” Company was the shop force that repaired and maintained equipment, and “C” company consisted of the train crews, block operators, etc.
A lot of drafted railwaymen from the US found themselves running trains in Europe
As someone mentioned, I don’t think doing all three would work - be hard to explain a Deutsch Reichsbahn train with swastika herald running thru the US during WW2!!
The period after D-Day would make sense, if you wanted to go for the European side. US built engines were unloaded and used on the French railways as the troops pushed the Germans back. There’s a lot of German “Era II” equipment out there from Marklin and others, and a fair amount of French too. (Unfortunately UK stuff is generally OO scale not HO.) Keep in mind though that railways were targeted by both sides, the Allies bombed railway centers and the retreating Germans destroyed rail lines to prevent their use by the Allies.
Interestingly the Germans built decoy trains, trains built to look like general freights that they used to try to lure US and British pilots into strafing. Once the planes got close, the sides of the boxcars could swing out of the way revealing a variety of machine and anti-aircraft guns that would be trained on the plane.
My suggestion would be to either do Europe in 1945, when the railways had been worked on and put back in order, or concentrate on the US during the war, perhaps having a separate area (like a separate level) with dioramas of the fighting in Europe.
Do you have a source for this? I’ve never heard of it, which doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen of course. Both sides used a lot of dummies for just about everything. But aircraft guns are more a deterrent and a way to make the attackers less effective rather then being very good at downing aircraft’s. They do of course shoot down aircraft.
The Germans did for example try this with U-boats. But it was a complete failure when boats with extra AA guns tried to engage aircraft’s. It simply did not work.
Magnus
Thanks for the photos, Brother Schmitt! Nice to know that my long-term memory isn’t hallucinating.
I don’t know about a train rigged as a Q-boat, but I have seen gun camera photos of German flakwagen (passenger car length, with an AA automatic weapon mount on each end) as part of the consist of an ordinary goods train. Judging by the amount of flying steam at the end of the tracer stream, the eight .50 cal Brownings carried by a P47 could turn a locomotive boiler into a colander in pretty rapid order.
Speaking semi-professionally (my father commanded an AA automatic weapons battalion) it would make more sense to park a ‘bait’ train at a designated spot where there were plenty of AA weapons in concealed positions on the ground around it. Ground gunners would be more effective if the attacker wasn’t targeting THEM. After all, the aircraft has a tremendous advantage. The train is confined to following a clearly visible set of rails. The aircraft is under no such constraint.
During the Pacific War, my prototype largely escaped all but incidential damage. The B29 raids which might have targeted rail facilities were highly inaccurate (one reason why the emphasis was shifted to night area bombing with incendiaries.) Low-level fighter-bomber sweeps, conducted by carrier aircraft, were only sporadic and confined to the last few months of the war. OTOH, there is a documented case where, frustrated by seeing trains steam by on the shoreside rail line, a submarine commander sent a team ashore to rig a bridge for scuttling - then watched as the next train and the bridge went into the drink after failing to achieve orbit with the initial liftoff.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
I agree 100%. The Germans did use Flak on trains as a deterrent to attacking airplanes. I would not think they downed very many aircraft though. The amount of spent for shooting down a single aircraft is staggering. So they did use FLAK on trains. There is no doubt about it.
This makes a lot more sense as well. But my guess is that any dummies placed in a yard or on a track would be only to act as a decoy and the hope that the strafing planes would waist bullets, rockets and bombs on such a target instead. I can not see the any reason what so ever for the Germans to waist AA guns in an attempt to draw airplanes in to attack. They simply didn’t have any to spare. Their was enough hot targets that actually needed protection. And as you say Chuck, sitting inside the target, which is sitting still with no protection just makes them really good soft targets. Why sit in the target? Remember that at
One of my “ultimate layout” ideas was to model a german railyard in eastern Poland around summer time 43. Loaded trains of troops and equipment going east to Russia and possibly south for Italy, hospital trains going west. Unfortunately, the cost for model equipment today would be about the same as what Germany was shelling out for the real stuff then [;)]
One other potentionally interesting modelling idea is what the Germans refer to as Stunde 0. The zero hour after hostilities ended and before civilization made a comeback. You can model overloaded trains with people being moved in gondolas for quite a distance (Hamburg - Cologne for instance) moving slowly past devastated areas. Think destroyed bridges being raised from the rivers / moved out of the way while the train runs slowly over a temporary bridge. Bombed yards with craters and wrecked cars etc. And of course the famous Trümmerbahnen. Narrow gauge trains moving the rubble of the bombed cities out of the way.
greetings,
Marc Immeker
IIRC it was Quentin Aanenson who talked about that. If you watched the recent Ken Burns film “The War” on PBS, Aanenson was one of the guys from Luverne MN who was interviewed. Maybe five years ago the local Mpls-St.Paul PBS station did a documentary just on his experiences as a P-47 pilot with him narrating, based on his memoirs of the war. I think he said a friend of his was killed when a seeminly normal freight train turned out to be hiding machine guns or anti-aircraft guns, and shot the guy’s plane down during a low-level strafing run.
But I could be remembering it wrong, it has been a few years since that aired.
On a different subject, Preiser does make figures of WW2 refugees.
Hi, thank you very much for telling me.
I have another theory, it is possible that he remembers incorrectly rather then you. It’s quite common that even the people who where there have it wrong. Historians comes across it all the time. Memoirs written a decade or two after an event is notoriously poor sources. But it could also have happened. The Germans experimented with absolutely everything during the war, so really anything is possible. It would not have been the craziest thing they tried! [:D]
Do you know if Presier makes good looking US military equipment for the 50’s?
Magnus
Did anyone see the special program on I believe the “History Channel” about the huge underground station built in New York City under the Grand central Station during WW2 by FDR for his use. I believe they caled it “M21”
TheK4Kid
YES! That was a very cool show I thought it interesting that one of the Rail cars used by FDR was still parked down there that’s a cool piece of history that should be on display someplace!
It was cool, and its exact location and how to gain entrance to it is still CLASSIFIED.
They made the History Channel people turn off their cameras as they went there through the classified entrance way.
TheK4Kid
I guess you could build the US part in your house and the European part in your neighbors and the space in between could be called the Atlantic Ocean. 
If it were me, I’d prefer to build a WWII themed layout for public display rather than my own home use. Is there a military museum near you? That might be a good location. With all the available European equipment and structures, it shouldn’t be too difficult, and could be made modular if necessary. I think I’d build a bomb-damaged German railyard, that was still barely functioning among the chaos. Having spent some military time in the early 1970s in Germany, I often wondered what the roundhouses and railyards I visited had been like 30 years before. And it was impressive to see the very same Kriegsloks in use that had been operating then.
Bob Yarger
Huge? One short track and a two-car platform under the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel doesn’t strike me as huge, especially when compared with the two-level fan of tracks for full-length passenger trains immediately adjacent.
After watching a fair cross-section of their offerings, I think the History Channel should be re-named the Melodrama Channel.
Chuck (native New Yorker modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
If you lived in Auburn Indiana or near it, there is the "Kruse World War Two Victory Museum there just west of exit 126 and Interstate 69 with lots of room left yet inside.
Also located nearby is the Hoosier Warbirds Museum with a lot of interesting WW2 aircraft and relics in it, including my friend Bill Jones Nagasaki and Hiroshima display, he was the first combat photographer to take pictures of both cities after they were bombed with atomic weapons.
The show was long on speculation and short on facts. There have been several threads on the “station”. There were links to several web sites with information and mis-information. One site has a plan of showing the location of the track. It was originally built to serve a steam plant that was torn down to make way for the hotel. It was probably never used by Roosevelt. One story says General Pershing used it once. The car has been identified, by some, as a baggage car downgraded to maintenance of way service and parked there because the location is out of the way. The “military color” is probably Pullman Green or some similar railroad color.
This is typical of history programs on most channels. They take some small fact and blow it out of proportions and claim it to be real, It really irritates me because it makes people know less then they did before the show. Then someone comes along and trouts it out like they are experts after having seen one show and claim that real experts like historians are not quick enough to react and can not tell the truth like the cool TV shows.
The popularity of historical programs have led to a complete void of facts. I think it is a shame when they say something like “we can not be certain but this is what could have happened” and suddenly Hitler and Elvis where lovers since Elvis did visit Germany(a couple of years after old Adolfs death but who cares) [:D]
Please note that I’m not in any way implying that anyone in this thread have done so. I do not want to come across like that.
Magnus