When the Kaiser Comes to Call
Impatiently resigned to remaining in Baden-Baden
The six people in this picture are frustrated and angry. They’re in the forecourt at the Baden-Baden station and no train can arrive or depart because the German Imperial Train is sitting on the one and only track that serves Baden-Baden. (Nor will a second track ever be added!)
The man leaving the telephone booth - one of the first installed in Germany – has just told his butler that he’ll be returning home because his train can’t enter the station to take him to Hannover.
His wife, waiting in their car, has heard the chauffeur of the royal blue limousine arguing with a railway official while the car’s aristocratic owner listens, impatiently resigned to remaining in Baden-Baden until His Imperial Majesty, the German Kaiser and King of Prussia, whose train it is, departs.
We know that the Kaiser actually isn’t at Baden-Baden today. During the morning he sailed out of Kiel harbor to race his schooner-yacht, Meteor, on the Baltic. Well into that race which he was winning, his boat was overtaken by a motor-launch and a telegram, hastily stuffed into a cigarette case, was thrown aboard.
The Kaiser was stunned upon reading that one of his few genuine friends, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the several thrones of the Austro-Hungarian empire, “was assassinated this morning at Sarajevo”.
My claim that the Kaiser was at Baden-Baden conducting a Kaiserkonferenz is, therefore, not historically accurate. I’ve invented a situation that could only have happened at Baden-Baden station with its single track, a well-documented morsel of German railway trivia.
The HO scale Imperial Train blocking traffic at Baden-Baden was produced in four subscription increments by Märklin/Trix of Göppingen in the 1990s. From the moment the first pair of carriages was delivered, the now legendary model of the Kaiserzug has occupied the pinnacle of HO scale manufactured perfection. Including its Prussian S10 locomotive, the train leaves little or nothing to be desired from the point-of-view of uncompromising 1/87th model making. Though they’re virtually impossible to see through the tiny windows of the Kaiser’s and the Empress’s carriages, the Persian rugs that lay upon the floors of the real train have been reproduced!
The coats-of-arms of royalties who are married to one another always derive from those of their birth families and are, therefore, different. We discover, on the sides of the two carriages occupied by the German imperial couple, their personal escutcheons only 5 millimeters high - 3/16th of an inch - faultlessly printed in seven matched colors.
The Imperial Train was produced only once, as were all but a handful of the other models in The Collection, thus making them extremely hard - if not impossible - to find in the second-hand market.
