When I was eight years old or so, in the mid-1960s, my grandfather bought us a West-German-made, H0-scale Märklin model train set for Christmas. Here is the first of many logos in this post:

As a result of this family history, I grew up with more hands-on knowledge of the German rail system than the American one, though I didn't make it to Germany for another 20 years. On my first trip to Europe, I used a Eurail Pass to travel all over West Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland. A few years after that, I lived in East Germany for eight months and became very well acquainted with its rail system, the Deutsche Reichsbahn, which weirdly preserved the name of the pre-1945 German rail system.

West Germany's system was the Deutsche Bundesbahn (German Federal Railway), or DB.

After reunification, the Bundesbahn rebranded to Deutsche Bahn (German Railway), still conveniently DB, and absorbed the Reichsbahn in 1994.

I was along for this ride.

A distinctive feature of East German train travel was Mitropa, the state company that operated dining cars and train-station cafes.

Mitropa food was awful, at least in the cafes. Late at night, a Mitropa cafe might be the only thing open in East Berlin, serving leathery bread rolls, dubious cold cuts, and poisonous coffee. Over the following decades my Mitropa memories evolved from outright trauma into perverse fondness. When I ran across a Mitropa serving-platter in an antique store, I grabbed it with unexpected delight. In the same vein, I recently acquired an H0-scale model of a Mitropa dining car at a Berlin flea market.

Back in Seattle, I dug out the plastic carton containing that old Märklin set. It had been stored undisturbed for decades. I put together some track and tried out the locomotive, which sort of worked, minus features such as headlights and a reverse function. One thing led to another and I ended up taking it apart for a cleaning with help from online videos. I also made a plywood base for a permanent track setup, which now occupies my underused dining table.

The Mitropa dining car now goes around a rather simple track, hitched implausibly to several heterogeneous freight cars and pulled by a 1930s steam locomotive. The unfolding plan is to find some authentic German rolling stock when I am back in Berlin. It turns out that the East Germans manufactured model trains, too, and there is lots of used inventory floating around (my dining car for example).

I'm not too interested in the historical deep-dives that obsess a lot of model train enthusiasts, but I have my own history and it might be fun to build a symbolic simulacrum of that. The resulting world, confined to a smallish table-top layout, and located in Seattle, would combine: