This 1:87 scale model is a result of seventeen years of effort by Marc Antiglio, a noted Swiss civil engineer. The model represents three railways , the Swiss railways – SBB, the Rhatische Bahn – RhB and the imaginary Kaeserberg Bahn or Chemins de fer du Kaeserberg – KBB/CFK.
CFK is located in the town of Freiburg, near Berne in southwest Switzerland, about a 2 hr drive from Zurich. I had the chance to visit the layout in September of 2013 and took a lot of pics which you can check out here.
The three storey purpose built building for the layout is worth studying for the civil engineering technology used in it’s own right ….
Power is generated with it’s own solar panels…..
Visitors first enter into a slick reception area surrounded by glass …
…and a nice underfoot display educates those uninitiated about the various scales.
Visitors are then arranged in groups of 40 and are taken into a small theater where the layout, it’s history and the techniques used are presented in a short audio visual. It was unfortunately in French which was Greek to me but then a picture says a thousand words ….
once the presentation is over we enter the lowest level in which there is an extensive staging yard and in which by my estimate atleast a hundred trains could be stored …..
a stair case then leads us to the next level ….
where one gets to see a large Ho standard gauge layout….
they have a nice arrangement to prevent prying hands from reaching into the layout . Once a hand crosses the red line, an infra red beam is triggered and an alarm goes off alerting the staff in attendance to the intrusion…..
the staircase then leads to the third level where there is an HOm display ….
a part of it is under construction ….
and in the center is a smaller display which shows off the various materials and techniques used at CFK …..
including how to super-elevate track….
the view from the third level looking down upon the main layout area is quite nice ….
After the layout has been viewed one can go into the basement level where there is a cut away model of an Ae6/6 locomotive which has a Train Simulator software linked to the actual controls. One can learn how to drive the locomotive over various routes ….
All in all , a model railway very slickly presented and extremely well executed considering it is all analog control.