da martin67 » 30 mar 2020, 13:27
Ciao Riccardo,
glad you like my layout! And here goes the story.
Back in 1979, when I was 12 years old, my parents took me and my brothers to Italy for the first time. I grew up in south eastern Bavaria, and the trip took us via Tavisio to the Cavallino (VE) area. Back then there was no Autostrada from Villach to Udine, we had to go along the SS13 all the way. I loved the little villages with their terracotta colours and kept looking our for trains and immediately fell in love with those brown electrics (E.636 and E.626) and grey coaches, so different to what we had in Germany. I liked the different style of catenary and the (to my eyes) strange trucks on the road. From then on, we took this trip at least once a year. Sure that I wanted to have such trains on my model railway and I started dreaming of a layout in an Italian setting, with those sympathetic, somewhat run down houses. As a boy, I didn't have money, so it remained a dream and for years I had to get along with my few German and Austrian models. As with so many boys, the interrest in model railways declined, girls, later girls and cars, got much more interresting. But, even declined, the railways never vanished entirely, and I kept collecting Herpa trucks and rebuilding them.
I later years, with more money in my pockets, I started collecting trains of all kinds. Around 2002, I rediscovered my love to Lima and I started to collect this brand, and slowly sell most of my other stuff. Yet, I loved exotic trains a lot. In 2009, a friend asked me if I would be interrested in an own layout and join him to display it on a regional train show. That's what I did, I took an old Noch-layout which I remodelled into a desert scene with sand and palm trees. After five years, menawhile I had my second layout (japanese N-scale), the exhibitior asked me if I could bring something new for 2014.
Through my research on Lima, I started to visit the Verona Model Expo from 2013 on. There I found many things of my childhood dreams. Especially the houses in terracotta colours. I saw, how my fellow Italian modellers create their scenes, I loved the club layouts. In the end I decided to go "Italian", which is rather exotic here in Germany. In 2014 I exhibited my layout for the first time and it draw much attention from the visitors. The houses came from Italian manufacturers like Struttura Ferroviaria, Ma.Co.Mo and CR Ninive. HEKI just introduced a line of mediterranean trees, which came just at the right time. And I restarted building Italian trucks...
This was the short version of my story.
Martin
Lima Collector's Site: