"The locomotive had just been unhooked from the El Capitan passenger train from Chicago at 8:45 a.m. on Jan. 25, 1948, when the accident occurred.
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Huh. Ya don’t see that every day.
Something similar over the Mosel River, April 1945:
Bad day at the ol’ station:
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If it hadn’t been for those telephone or power lines …
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Sounds like you have almost talked yourself into building it … 
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I agree. He is probably cutting plastic now. 
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I would be more likely to incorporate a BR52 into a scene on my East German layout, which used to be modular but may become an actual layout once the grandbabies start appearing. You have to have something to do when the weather is too bad for shooting.
I like Kolaches. Before Buckee’s became a thing in the area the place to go was the Czech Stop. As with most important things I even have the exit memorized - 253 off of I-35. It’s in West, Texas, not West Texas, but the town of West, in Texas. Probably the most famous thing that ever happened there was this:
I’d bet someone has already done something similar to this. Apparently it became a thing.
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The wife is a fan. It was her or SIL brought some back, they don’t travel as well across half the county.
I will have to look but I think I have that same locomotive. Not sure how the rest of the scene would look to even think about building. I will stick it on the vision board with the other ideas to fade away in the future.
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My wife’s grand father was a Czech refugee from just as WW2 started and joined the RAF - he used to make them from the original Czech way, with fruit or cheese, very tasty indeed. His is an unbelievable story — Escaping Nazi arrest warrants - walking from Czech to Spain and escaping to Canada was only the beginning …
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I would like to hear that story sometime.
As for me, I prefer the sausage filled ones. I don’t know if they’re authentic but they’re damned good.
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Sorry for the late reply @18bravo … I only know parts of it from what my wife’s grandmother told me when we used to visit them in Portsmouth ( they both passed away within a year of each other several years ago now).
On the German invasion in 39 of Czech, he joined what I would suppose you would call some sort of local resistance movement, mostly things like anti Nazi leaflets, posters etc…
He got word he was about to be arrested and probably executed so he and about 4 or 5 others who were also wanted, and that night, packed a back pack with a few key things and escaped the curfew and then mainly walked over a space of 4 months from Czech into Spain and onto Portugal, by living off the land or stealing food to survive.
From Portugal they split up and he then made his way to Canada on a boat and he paid for his passage by working as crew…
From there, he came back Britain and joined the RAF where he worked as an Int Officer for the duration of the war and during that time met SWMBOs grandmother. He joined the Int element of the RAF due to him being fluent in, Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian, and he could make conversation in Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Polish, Slovak and Austrian… So you can see he had a gift for languages.
After the war, him and his wife went back to Czech and lived a normal life.
On the Russian invasion in 68, through his old contacts, he found out he was on a Russian arrest list from records they had from the war as he was a very active anti communist.
His wife (my wife’s grandmother) told me that they got a phonecall and started to pack the bare essentials and family photos and about an hour later they saw about 3 or 4 what they imagined Soviet agency cars pull up and troops spill out into their apartment block and as that happened, they got out through a rear fire escape, into their car and they drove south from Prague without looking back… They then got to within about 3 miles of the Czech/Austrian border and walked through a forest into a new life. Contacted the UK embassy as the wife was a dual national and flew to Paris, them UK, and never went back to Czech until they split from USSR and got their independence back…it’s quite a remarkable story really…
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