How the Collection Was Created

42 Years of Passion, Study and Hard Work

A train is an almost living organism within its historical and social contexts. Somewhat like the bloodstream, trains carry people and goods through intricate networks to and from the contexts of our lives.

Why 1914? The answer to that question turns out to be more important – and more interesting – than the models of The Collection. Something buried deeper than my fondness for model trains was driving my need to create The Collection.

I first became aware of “1914” in 1939 when I was a six-year-old boy in Cleveland. My father had volunteered for the United States Army in 1917 when our nation joined the First World War which, he carefully explained, had been in progress since 1914. He told me how he’d become an artillery officer serving until the war ended in 1918.

It was September of 1939 when we went to see “The Wizard of Oz”. The program included a newsreel that showed the German army attacking Poland. I remember being frightened by the images of Stuka dive-bombers and dead civilians. In that moment, those black-and-white images showed me how horrible war is – a sudden shock to a little boy that’s influenced my view of history ever since. That shock was present in my unconscious when I answered Professor Taylor’s question asking why he saw me so often standing before the names of the fallen of the First World War engraved in the stone of the cloister walls of Magdalen College at Oxford. I was then 18 and unable to believe that so many had died from all the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and everywhere else in Britain, France and Germany and all the other nations that fought that war. It was – and remains – incomprehensible to me. Far more of those university students died in the First World War than in the Second, as Professor Taylor was to teach me, and for more or less no reason.

A.J.P. Taylor invited me to study the causes of the First World War with him informally. I was a full-time student at Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Fine Art and so I agreed to go to his room in Magdalen College on Wednesday evenings to be taught by a man I had yet to learn was considered one of the greatest historians of the twentieth century. It was pure luck. Or was it? Might something else have been going on? I certainly had the interest in the subject and Professor Taylor had seen that. What I was to learn from him became the haunting background – or was it the impulse? – to the creation of The Sarajevo1914 Collection.

At some point in the ensuing three years of study, Taylor and I agreed that war is the primary evil that humanity – and therefore civilization – is prey to. Images from the newsreel in Cleveland recurred often during our Wednesday evenings. 1914 became the focus of my lessons. All of the causes of that war – many of them years in the making – coalesced in 1914 and that date became shorthand for the evils of war. While making the model soldiers for King George at that same time, it occurred to me that the men they represented would die in the war whose causes I was then studying with Professor Taylor. I knew perfectly well how honored I was to have been given that commission by the King, yet “1914” imparted a melancholy to it. The uniforms I created for those little models were of that exact year.

Twenty-seven years then elapsed to find me, during the summer of 1979, staring at a model locomotive in the window of a shop on West 45th Street in Manhattan. “It hauled the ‘Orient-Express’ I was told, the awe in the shopkeeper’s voice still resonating forty-three years later.

Of course I’d heard of the Orient-Express but knew only that it had run in Europe and was famous for its cuisine and the spies that once traveled in it. Nor was I at all sure of the meaning of the “K. Bay. Sts. B.” on the sides of the tender attached to the locomotive I’d just bought. Minutes later, crossing Fifth Avenue, I thought I should have asked the man in the shop if he had the carriages of the Orient-Express for sale. I’d ask the next time I was in the neighborhood.

A week or two later found me in Scribner’s bookshop on Fifth Avenue where, stacked on one of their display tables, were copies of “Orient Express”, a book by a man I hadn’t heard of called Cookridge. Published only a few months earlier, his book appeared loaded with information and so I bought one, unaware that, upon publication, it had been heralded as a classic. What a timely stroke of luck, I thought. Was it luck or was there something else going on?

Having read the book, I then had an immediate reason to return to the shop on West 45th Street where I was disappointed to hear: “Well, Liliput in Austria makes a pretty poorly detailed model of the train that can’t be compared to the detail of the locomotive you bought.” The young man shrugged apologetically in the way of New Yorkers and gave me a resigned grin. “Sorry.”

I bought Liliput’s poorly detailed models anyway. Their “chestnut teak” plastic sides turned out to be a fairly accurate attempt at the color of the real train, evoking a cherished image from Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir “Speak Memory”. Forty-two years after that moment I would own a superbly detailed model, a cousin of the Orient-Express: “The St. Petersburg-Vienna-Nice Express”, the luxury train the Nabokov family traveled in to the Riviera during the Russian winters before 1914. 

At that moment in 1979 I had no way to run my detailed locomotive and less detailed carriages. Nor had I any way to understand that the real Orient-Express was hauled on every daily trip across Europe by twelve very different locomotives between its origin in Paris and its destination at Constantinople. Those twelve mighty express locomotives and their numerous variants became a core study of The Collection, nor does that study seem likely ever to be finished.

A more urgent need abetted my wish to have a layout on which the train might run. My wife Brenda and I were planning to move to a larger apartment and so I built into those plans a modest, 4X8 foot layout of track and landscaping that would fold against a wall to be out of the way when not in use.

A trip to Paris shortly after that move enticed me onto another “track”. I bought a model of a German locomotive that had been given in reparation by Germany, along with hundreds of others, to France and Belgium after the First World War. It was black with all the appropriate French markings of the era following the Second World War. And so, you might wonder, what that purchase had to do with The Sarajevo 1914 Collection? With the Orient-Express? An excellent question and one that has actually helped to prompt this story.

At the moment when I bought that German/French locomotive, there was no thought of a “Sarajevo 1914 Collection,” a notion that wouldn’t occur until a few years later. While standing in that long-forgotten shop in Paris, I began to fall victim to the charm of the six railway companies that had comprised the French national network until they were nationalized in 1938 into La Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Française – the SNCF. Until that moment of nationalization, those six companies had borne witness to a century of the confounding eccentricities of French railway history, indeed to the history of France itself. The 4X8 foot flat layout I built in our apartment in New York evolved slowly over forty years into something like an exercise ground for my smallish, eclectic “French Collection” that loosely represents those six peculiar companies as they were in 1935, three years before all of them, with the stroke of a pen, were nationalized into oblivion. The black German locomotive reverted, through long and exacting work, to its original state as an S10 express locomotive of the Royal Prussian Railway Administration, a star of the Sarajevo 1914 Collection that hauled the “Ostend-Vienna-Orient-Express” through Germany until the First World War began.

Nor has the French Collection been easy to assemble, the French model railway manufacturers going into and out of business with frustrating capriciousness. In fact, my French collection could never have existed were it not for my ability to read and speak French, the skill I’ve needed to be ready to grab certain models before their makers disappeared.

Model railroading isn’t a sophisticated fraternity; few French model railroaders know English, nor vice versa. Indeed, virtually all model railroading is concerned with the country where it happens – French layouts in France, American ones in the U.S., German ones in Germany. I seem to be an anomaly, interested in the railways of all the countries – all twelve of them – through which the old Orient-Express traveled. It’s an interest that required a fair knowledge of European history when I started while the two collections have forced the increase of that knowledge through more than forty-five years of unrelenting study. Subscriptions to two French and two German model railway magazines – at an expense I could never afford today – gave me an immersion in the subject few others could have known. Countless – literally countless – technical railroading terms in those two languages (while learning the English terms) along with priceless romantic lore, political and railroading history and a concomitant improvement in my use of those languages were what I gained during those ten years of learning before I let the subscriptions lapse. It was a wide-ranging odyssey in itself, while the knowledge gained became the bedrock of the two collections. The magazines taught me that trains are one thing; understanding their contexts is quite another. Too many model railroaders are interested only in the models and not in the pervasive influences the real trains have exerted upon modern civilization. A train is an almost living organism within its historical and social contexts. Somewhat like the bloodstream, trains carry people and goods through intricate networks to and from the contexts of our lives.

There’s no better example than the Orient-Express. The idea of a train that would run every day, crossing twelve international frontiers without its passengers having to leave the comfort of their compartments and the restaurant car is still revolutionary. Since its first run in 1883, nothing better has been devised, except perhaps, the often dubious advantage of flight.

Now the Orient-Express doesn’t run at all. Superseded finally by superhighways for motor cars and by the airplane, luxury trains would, today, seem too slow, too expensive. Ultra-luxurious latter-day “reincarnations” of the “Orient-Express”, featuring faultlessly restored carriages from the 1920s and ‘30s, run from time to time though they are hyper-expensive and don’t serve useful schedules. In fact, they’re mindlessly exclusive “rides” such as Disney might have dreamed up; not serious rail travel. Like cruise ships that don’t really “go” anywhere, reincarnated luxury trains are meant mostly to recall the comforts and flavors of the heyday of great railway journeys; they don’t take their passengers to necessary destinations.

My trains all represent means of reaching necessary destinations. They’re all working scale models of the real things, as exact as today’s intertwined technologies can make them. In fact, the state-of-the-art has reached the point beyond which it’s hard to imagine much further progress. HO scale carriages of “La Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Europeens” now have interior LED lighting totally free from the flicker that annoyed model railroaders for a century. The beds in the sleeping compartments are turned down, awaiting their passengers’ return from the restaurant car where the table lamps are lighted. I’ve lived to see – to own – the trains of dreams from more than 40 – or a hundred – years ago.

But, forty years ago, The Sarajevo 1914 Collection began to be far more than trains. In fact, I should confess that The Collection’s trains are, today, little more than the “hook” upon which my somewhat eclectic view of European history has been hung. While fully accurate, that history comes alive through the individual stories of the minuscule people who are the soul of The Collection. Those stories entered my consciousness in a peculiar way.

At the time I was becoming mesmerized by HO scale model trains, Paul Preiser, the German maker of finely detailed tiny HO scale figures, began to offer a series of people representing the era before the First World War. The poor, the rich, children in myriad activities, servants, soldiers, tradesmen, rulers, farmers, railwaymen and numerous others – indeed, “the European people” of the early twentieth century began to become available, helping bring to life model train layouts recalling that time. And as I “listened” to those minuscule people, I began to “hear” their stories of Europe stumbling toward the hell of the Great War – a subject I’ve studied since high school, disbelieving to this day that the world could have been that stupid, horrified at the fates awaiting those little people on the day The Collection represents – the 28th of June, 1914, the day when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Habsburg-Este was assassinated at Sarajevo. And so, it was actually Paul Preiser’s 14-16 millimeter tall characters that determined the direction The Sarajevo 1914 Collection was to take. With the announcement in the 1980s of the first group of those evocative little people, The Collection suddenly had a purpose greater than its trains, a means of more deeply plumbing the madness unleashed on the first of August of 1914. Yet I have no interest in creating battlefields and destruction in HO scale; the date – 28th of June 1914 – is ominous enough and the stories those tiny people have to tell are towering reminders of humanity’s epic folly.

(visit thesarajevo1914collection.com.)

Preiser’s old-fashioned people were an acknowledgement of the direction the European model train manufacturers were taking; their trend in the early 1980s was a backward look at the trains of the turn of the twentieth century, the two or three decades before “Sarajevo”. And it was a time of great leaps into HO scale realism. Stupefying details became possible with progress in injection molding and lost-wax casting techniques. Reproduction of tiny parts for locomotives and rolling stock became routine during the 1970s to the 1990s. Of course prices went up accordingly but the improvements in realism were worth it. Now, with simulated smoke streaming from its chimney and LED headlamps, an HO scale locomotive built around the turn of the twenty-first century actually looks like a miniature version of the real locomotive from the turn of the twentieth century. Digital control means the model railroader can cause moving locomotives to sound their whistles whenever he likes; the sound of coal being shoveled into the firebox is now possible along with the sound of steam blasting out of safety valves and brakes screeching to a halt. Real excitement has begun to happen for the first time since primitive clockwork locomotives hauled their tinplate toy trains in circles around Victorian playroom floors.

With the European manufacturers trending into the past, I determined to concentrate on the Länderbahn era – the period of the private railway companies and those “national” railways of the constituent kingdoms and grand-duchies of the German empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the French republic and any other nation through which the Orient-Express traveled in 1914. My initial goal was to have at least one of the locomotives of each of the twelve railway authorities crossed by that train from Paris to Constantinople on the 28th of June 1914 and, in about 2002, I was able to get my model of the “O-E” from Paris to Vienna with the necessary seven correct locomotives. But that’s as far as it’s gone – so far. Nor was it easy up to that point. And I’ve been waiting since around 1984, hoping there’d be at least one manufacturer who might come through with the last six or seven HO scale locomotives on that arcane list. Realistically, it may never happen; the market for HO scale locomotives of the pre-1914 era in Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria and Turkey is so limited that it's virtually non-existent. I may have to be content with my Orient-Express sitting in the Ost Bahnhof in Vienna, waiting for the Hungarian locomotive that may never arrive to haul it to Budapest.

And so I busy myself with other elements of The Collection. Its people are at least as important as the trains, probably more so though they cost little except for the hours I spend turning Herr Preiser’s figures into the personalities of The Sarajevo 1914 Collection.

My first attempt accessed all the skill I’d acquired thirty years earlier when I made the model soldiers commissioned by the King. But HO scale figures are less than one quarter the size of those soldiers. Yet the HO figures in The Collection are as detailed as those soldiers were. In fact, my first attempt wasn’t as much a “conversion” of an existing HO scale figure as it was sculpture from scratch. Knowledge of anatomy from the Ruskin School and a block of styrene plastic six by six millimeters and 15 millimeters high became, after three days of carving and painting, the Grand Duchess Olga, sister of Tsar Nicholas the Second, wearing a gown by Worth in Paris where we find her on the platform at the Gare de l’Est, wearing that new gown while she speaks with the Chef de Train and a Conducteur of the International Sleeping Car Company. Her Imperial Highness was actually on the Orient-Express that departed Paris on the 28th of June 1914 as were several of the other HO scale passengers in The Collection. Among them is Paul Wittgenstein who would become renowned after The Great War as a concert pianist using only his left arm, his right one having been lost in the first month of the fighting in August, 1914.

That gathering on the platform of the Gare de l’Est is the principal introduction to The Collection where we meet the first of its dramatis personae. Their stories will escort us through the coming four weeks that culminate in the several declarations of war after the first of August, 1914.

There is no evidence on the layout where the trains run and the people are getting ready for dinner that the First World War is about to begin. All is peaceful on this late June evening. But the undercurrents are powerful. For decades the people of Europe have talked about “when the war comes”. Not if; when. Its causes were unimaginably complex and I’m still having a hard time believing the horrible immensity of what happened – for no good reason. While the layout where the trains run represents both sides in the conflict, the Orient-Express is neutral. Operated by the International Sleeping Car Company, the train existed to serve its travelers in the best possible style, regardless of their nationalities. It stopped running in the first week of the war. When it began to run again, the map of Central Europe had changed almost beyond recognition. The Collection is best described as a glimpse of Europe on the eve of that great convulsion.

But it’s also a glimpse not only of the legendary first-class-only high-speed express trains; there were lots of other trains used by the peoples of Europe, some of them consisting of antiquated, ramshackle carriages carrying not only the customary three classes but also fourth-class passengers as well, vast numbers of whom would suffer in the looming war.

Each of these HO scale trains is an exact representation of the full-scale machines that traveled the rails of Europe in 1914 – not only its main lines but many of the long-forgotten branch lines that served the remotest rural backwaters of those kingdoms and empires. The Orient-Express encountered and left in its wake – almost looking down its nose at – the countless unsung lesser trains that imparted charming local color to the polyglot landscapes spanning the vastness between France and Turkey. Many models of those quaint passenger carriages and fancifully decorated goods wagons have found their way into The Collection. The unique nature of The Collection brings to life the remote places and forgotten details where this history happened, along with the trains that connected them, no matter how inefficiently or uncomfortably.

Trains of the Austro-Hungarian empire are among the rarest of all the HO scale railway models. The Sarajevo Collection includes most of the ones that have been produced, mainly by small, artisanal operations in Austria and the Czech Republic. The goods wagons produced by Oskar Klein in Vienna and by the Heris company in Germany are among the most exquisitely detailed railway models ever produced. Their lettering in many of the languages of the old Habsburg empire offers hints at the extent of its sprawling size and cultural diversity.

Precious and unique to The Collection is the collection-within-the-collection of posters reduced photographically to HO scale of astoundingly sharp focus and accurate color. Included are posters that would only have been posted on the hoardings of exterior walls and station platforms on the 28th of June in 1914. Research into such timely accuracy has been a parallel study during the pursuit of the railway information – another odyssey demanding uncompromising correctness. Of course there are a number of classic images represented though my emphasis has been on the humble, unremembered posters of the era that advertised unglamourous household products and long-forgotten stage productions, clothes for people who weren’t well-to-do, wine, chocolate and tobacco, excursions by train to the French coasts and much more. Naturally, such mundane images are the hardest to find, especially as high-quality color reproductions. I know of no other railway layout anywhere that includes “real” posters that would have been seen only in an exact moment in history.

Exceptionally well-detailed HO scale motor vehicles of the 1914 era are also rare. The Collection includes many that were produced only once, others, equally well detailed, required assembly by soldering. A small number were hand-made by gifted artisans and very costly, while they’ve become powerful enhancements of the realism of their HO scale world.

To be uncompromising is the quality necessary to the creation of anything exceptional. I’ve always been guided by that precept. Now I’m old and have run out of time. The Collection needs a new curator.

The greatest part of The Collection, by far, was accumulated over a period of more than forty years out of a smallish shop in Stuttgart. I discovered Modellbahn-Center W. Schüler in an American model railway magazine in 1980. The company sold only model trains and their accessories and the shop’s carefully worded small-space ad in English caught my attention. From that moment W. Schüler became “the” supplier of The Collection. Wolfgang Schüler and his daughter, Ingrid Bitter, have been trusted associates in the selection of models and life-long friends.

Now Wolfgang and the shop are no more. Ingrid closed it in 2019 and established an on-line business specializing in Preiser figures and in Rolf Weinert’s models and marvelous superdetailing parts. Ingrid’s new business became successful at once. All of that happened at about the time I decided my collections were more or less complete.

And so I stare at what I’ve created, once in a while ennobling a forlorn locomotive to its 1914 glory with superb parts cast in bronze or nickel-silver, or reworking a “person” to make her – or him – seem more real, the better to help me understand who these people really are and the dangers they’ll soon face. And I do all that wondering if anyone else will care about them. Is there anyone in the world who might understand what I’ve tried to do – who might wish to become responsible for it?