A Work in Progress
Far more than a “model railway”
The landscaping can always be improved. Every year new models become available to enhance the collection. New stories constantly occur to me that help explain the times and places. Scale model railways are only “finished” when their creators’ imaginations shut down. “The Sarajevo1914 Collection” is far more than a “model railway”. In fact, the trains can be seen as a hook on which the peoples’ stories are hung.
Many of the goods wagons are decorated with fanciful designs – exactly like the originals - to advertise the beer, the sausages, the butter, the bread, the coffee, the champagne and the limestone carvings along with the countless other products carried in those charmingly old-fashioned vehicles.
A horsebox inscribed in Hungarian and German lends atmosphere to the story of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary who used Baron Rothschild’s horsebox to convey her thoroughbred hunters from one noble European estate to another.
The bi-lingual inscriptions on that wagon are so fine they illustrate superbly the immense strides made in the printing technologies used in HO scale manufacturing, to say nothing of the precise 1/87th scale accuracy of the models themselves. These remarkable creations of the present era encourage extreme close-up photography that would, simply, have revealed flaws until the nineteen-eighties when dramatic improvements in injection molding and printing began to occur.
