One of the most authentic model railroads of an East German chemical plant with industrial railways

Published on December 3, 2023

Rail transport modelling or model railroading includes not only beautiful landscapes and historic steam trains, but also scale models of large factory sites and industrial railways. One the one hand, there are model railway enthusiasts who enjoy passenger trains travelling through a miniature world. But on the other hand, there are also railway modellers who enjoy pointing out the dirty and the grimy on their model train layouts.

Olaf Brabandt is a German model railroader who follows exactly this philosophy in model making. He builds run-down, abandoned and dirty industrial sites. He was inspired by huge factories which were built in Eastern Europe in the 1980’s, especially in East Germany, for example steelworks, coal plants, refineries and chemical plants. All these large factories had a railway connection to transport raw materials. There were long coal trains, goods trains and industrial railways. Finally, rail traffic was determined by shunting operations.

In the last seven years, he built a model railroad layout in HO scale representing a part of the typical large-scale industry of the former GDR. His model railway layout has a size of 7.0 x 0.5 meters and depicts an East German chemical plant. There are fuel depots, large silo plants, loading and unloading points, pipe bridges and warehouses. It is an industrial yard built with a high level of detail: Patina, dirt, dust and grime are everywhere. Buildings, locomotives and freight cars are also carefully weathered.

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