I’m at a good place with my first dio in the Berlin Series, and since I’m iced in, may as well start on another, based on this iconic photo, from 1986:
First thing I need is a wall section…
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AFV Club makes one.
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Love it; one can never have quite enough Berlin!
I was planning to do one from the other side:
I may have to bump this one up a bit now!
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Thanks Dan. As it turns out, I have it, but I won’t be using it for this project. More than likely it’ll be used in the scale museum room mockup as a literal divider between the East and West Berlin exhibits.
There are a few issues with the AFV Club offering, aside from not being nearly long enough. The concrete pipe on top is way out of scale. I’ll be using .5 inch Evergreen tubing which is much close to scale. And unfortunately the decals in the set are not appropriate for my time period.
For my Wall dioramas, of which I have two planned (Boots has beaten me to photos, see below)
I’ll be doing the Wall Patrol diorama, and also a No Man’s Land diorama, with two runs of wall. Boots’ photo is almost exactly how I envision it - I have a Grenztrabi I’ve never built. I also have the Balaton Modell – MZ ETZ‑250. I may combine everything with a few figures based on photos I took back then. So I’m going to have to scratch a lot of wall.
That’s going to by a nice addition to your collection. I also plan to use Evergreen for the tank traps. The Tamiya set just doesn’t do it for me.
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Great minds think alike; I’ve had to compress the distances on my (planned set-up, but based on this pic:
which would also indicate that a wall could be made from readily available stuff, and not have one rely on the AFV Club product, though that is the stock I have.
I originally was going to use Tamiya or others tank obstacles, but a closer look showed that the GDR version was actually quite simple, so I just made my own.
Apologies for any perceived hijack, but I needed a nudge; these are great projects.
Lastly, I’ve linked this before and whilst I’m sure you doubtless have references, I thought I’d advertise this for the greater good; I mean, all that effort just to keep their own people in. One could weep; a simulation but none the worse for that:
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Not a problem at all. Great video for people to see. Some people get petulant about perceived deviations from “their” thread. I do not.
Think of all the toasters, blow dryers, and other consumer goods that could have been produced with the money that cost, and how much food could have been grown in that unused land.
(I specifically mention blow dryers because there’s a great scene in my novel that takes place in the Centrum in East Berlin where they’re selling Bulgarian blow dryers. The best part is that I saw it happen,
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Between chipping two inches of ice of my walkway, doing my reading, and entertaining a Chihuahua, I was actually able to make a little progress today. Eventually I want diorama of M151A1s as well as M151A2s.
I’ll probably make the pipe sections longer.
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What novel?
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Man, we’ve had super cold weather here, with highs in single digits plus strong winds. I think half the country is freezing its behind off. 
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I look forward to it!
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Lookin’ good, Rob! Not getting up to Berlin was my biggest regret about my time in Germany. I had an opportunity for a 3 month TDY at FS Berlin; but the company training NCO didn’t feel good the day she was supposed to send my paperwork up so my unit lost it’s slot. 
Stay frosty,friend! 
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Artwork for the sequel, in case anyone likes the first one. Subtitle has been deleted. I’ll probably go with “REDEMPTION IN IRAQ.”
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40 cm Rohr?
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Great pics. Although online sources say otherwise, they illustrate the fact that if a Wessie was next to the wall, he was technically in the Eastern zone.
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That’s 299,406 Marks per km of wall. Not counting concrete for the foundation and filling in the holes and gaps, or the top pipe. Labor - pretty much free if you wanted to eat…
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Every Wall Patrol was six pax in two gun trucks. We wore flak vests and a basic combat load. Gunners wore a .45 as well.
I have to make figures with flak vests. Just take a bit of time. I’ll leave the wrinkles in the vest as they really had them. As for the weird cracks you see in the left hand figure, they had to be removed as well.
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