Swiss Chris Railways
The '80s
The Märklin Krokodil
It was at Christmas 1978 that I received a Hornby Flying Scotsman and a rake of Gresley teak coaches. This was quickly augmented with the purchase of a tender driven (yuck) Evening Star, a green 08 with counterbalanced uncoupling and a few trucks. A trip to Switzerland in 1979 saw the addition of a Märklin-
Hornby were coming out with their Zero 1 digital controller so a few loco modules and a couple of slave units saw even my continental stock converted.
1980 and another trip to Switzerland got me a Hag Bodensee-
1981 saw the addition of some narrow gauge stock as Bemo had introduced their Rhätische Bahn HOm range.
I now designed a 4 board layout that could be pieced together. with a double track standard gauge layout and a single track metre gauge with passing places.
In 1984 I was given a shed 16' x 12'. This meant that I could have a permanent layout, and a rather ambitious plan was made initially as a single track folded over figure of 8 branch-
Bodensee -
The RhB Krokodil as used over the Albula to Sankt Moritz.
In the end I converted it to an end to end layout, but never managed to complete the hidden storeage areas.
This project eventually came to a halt in the early '90s, when I lost my job after 18½ years and I went to university.
The shed became a storage area with the boards being used as shelves. And there it sat for years until 2011 when after sometime thinking that I would like to get back to it, the oppertunity arose for me to re-
I had been working on the idea of Bondale / Bontal for a couple of years and with another redundancy occurring, I made a start on the project.
Early Days
Bondale Home
Model Railways
The 80s