De Graafstroom

Presented by Vincent de Bode

This layout portrays a fictitious narrow gauge (cape gauge?) tramline which follows the small Dutch river “de Alblas”, pictured in the year 1947.  We tried to get a nice image how things looked in those days. The buildings are as accurate as possible, only situated different. Scale is Proto 87, giving a gauge of 12.28mm. Using kitchen tables techniques it is probably not that accurate, but it looks OK. Wheels are filed down on both sides to get a profile as good as  Proto 87, maybe a tad bigger flanges.. The loco’s and carriages are etched kits, the wagons plastic kits. The chassis of the engines  are compensated, using changed High Level gearboxes.  We use modified AJ couplings, situated very low to get under the central buffers.

 Certainly a point of interest is  a tjalk (Dutch barge) ghosting up and down the river in light airs, without causing a ripple. The tjalk  shares the river with a swan, which potters? lazily along the riverbanks. 

We put a lot of effort to make the flat Dutch landscape convincing (we hope that is the case), so we made the layout deep. The backdrop is completely curved, made out  one piece (from roller curtain stuff) and painted by Len de Vries . The layout is illuminated by a lot of LED spots. For the technically interested, the baseboards are very leightweight build of ply and epoxy resin as are the transport boxes, Total weight is only 35 kgs.

It was build over a very long period (20 years!!) with a lot of help from Peter van der Kooij and Claude Moinier.

Hope you enjoy watching it and feel free to ask questions!