Willkommen!!!

Model Railroading has always been a love of mine, starting with the first layout I got for Christmas in 1970 when I was 6 years old growing up as an Army brat in Germany.  It was a Fleischmann HO set mounted to a 4x6 board.  I still have the rolling stock from that set to this day.  Like any kid, a lot of different things got my interest, however I always seem to gravitate back to the trains.

Going to college marked my first hiatus from the hobby, but it was a short one.  After getting married and going to grad school I started back into model railroading again.  I dabbled in German N scale for a few years, building a few hollow core door layouts that never went very far. I then started getting into southeastern US HO trains, and with the purchase of our first house I built a 22'x16' L shaped HO layout.  It was my first serious layout, and had all the typical first layout mistakes, but I was learning.  I even joined a local club, Smokey City Rails, which had a modular HO layout.  I made a lot of great friends thru the club, however I was never really satisfied with HO.  It took up too much space to do anything that looked realistic without having a warehouse to build a layout.   It was the late 1990's, and N scale started catching my eye again...

I started noticing that the quality and realism of N scale, and in particular US prototype models, was really improving.  Atlas, Kato, and MicroTrain rolling stock was starting to rival the quality of German prototype N scale maker Fleischmann, and with one big difference:  it was less than one third of the cost!  The HO layout was torn down, I sold off all my HO equipment to fund my switch to N scale, this time in US prototype, in particular southeastern railroading around Birmingham, Alabama. I built 2 different N scale Cahaba Southern layouts, one in 1997 and one in 2009.  More information on those two layouts can be found at Cahaba Southern.

Work on the second Cahaba Southern layout was going strong for almost 3 years when I hit a wall.  All the track was laid and running well, and the basic scenery shell was in place.  Something happened, and I just lost interest.  I dabbled with it every now and then, trying to get restarted, to no avail.   So a few years went by, and the layout room collected dust.

Early in 2014 I was getting restless and bored.  I needed a stress reliever, something to occupy my free time instead of justing watching TV.   I started to miss working on a layout again, but I couldn't bring myself to work on the Cahaba Southern.  I had done some thinking, and realized that while I enjoyed model railroading, I really didn't enjoy US prototype model railroading.  A big part of my identity was being that Army brat in Germany and being half German.  One day I was reminiscing about Germany, I was reminded of my enjoying German model railroads growing up.   Suddenly the realization hit that I what I really wanted to build is what fueled my dreams as a kid, eine Deutsche Bundesbahn Modellbahnanlage (a German Federal Railways model train layout)!

I thought about it a few more weeks, but the more I thought about it the more that realization I had was right:  I was building the wrong prototype, I needed to go back to my German roots.  It was time to tear down the Cahaba Southern, sell off the rolling stock, and start planning a new German prototype layout.  I told my wife my plans and ideas, and after some eye-rolling on her part the teardown of the Cahaba Southern started and the planning of the JaBe DB began.....