Layout - Mark Cihlar

Layout - Mark Cihlar - San Francisco Bay Area Chapter

ÖBB ALL THE WAY (Oesterreichische Bundesbahn) - I was born in Vienna, Austria. I began in 1958 with Kleinbahn. In the later years came Liliput and Fleischmann. In 1964 I came to California. I began some small layouts and finally in 1975 my ÖBB layout became reality. It has a transfer table on the left side and a turntable on the right side. There are two more small stations: one which has the connection with the narrow Gauge Hoe (Mariazeller Bahn). I have four hidden stations, 2,6,10,18 tracks (Schattenbahnhof), from where I can call all my trains on the layout (a total of 44 trains). One station is built from scratch representing my home town in Vienna. I also made the gravel train myself. They arrive there every day to Wien Beton (Vienna Cement). I built the cement yard which I have visited several times, in order to be able to copy it as close as possible. The cement yard belongs to the Company LAFARGE, which delivers gravel and cement in Austria and Germany. My layout was seen in the Modellwelt Magazine(Austria) 3/2000, which of course, made me very happy. All my trains run analog in 10 blocks (Transformers) and arrive in my fantasy Station (Vienna). They are: ICE from Hamburg, Transalpine from Basel, Orientexpress from Paris, Romulus from Rome and Venice, Chopin from Warsaw and Moskow with the famous Russian sleeper. Bela Bartok from Budapest. It is difficult to copy these trains a 100%, because there are still some models of cars not available. But, it is a good feeling to run these trains on my layout. Most of my rolling stock is ROCO (Austria).