Happy Anniversary!

I had a great time celebrating the 40th anniversary of the heritage Hedelands Veteranbane located 30 km. west of Copenhagen. It's a lot of work to run a heritage railway and adding an anniversary doesn't ease the burden. But getting all locos out, running special trains and giving visitors and passengers something extra will hopefully give an extra boost in PR and produce more passengers during the coming season's traffic. On the modelling side running narrow gauge trains in 1/1 scale surely is inspirational and I picked up several ideas while perching on the brakeman's platform.

A selection of locos outside the shed at Hedehusgård station.

One blog update during May is the consequence of the hours spent planning and helping executing the anniversary. But surely it was worth it. I had a great four day extended weekend with my friends on the railway and chatting with visiting enthusiasts from the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Finland.

M 3 awaits M 25 arriving in track 1 with a passenger train.

The extended timetable was seasoned with skip trains, alternating locos and extra train meets at stations. A day's extended timetable filled a full 10 A4 pages when printed out. Everything worked out fine and both traffic control and crews carried out the days' traffic with no panic.

After running around the three skips in its train, M 3 meets another passenger train at Rubjerg station pulled by Da 7 before returning to Hedehusgård 3.5 km away.

At Hedehusgård a 1923 Marshall steam roller worked a stone crusher breaking up stone. The Danish steam roller society visited HVB to celebrate the anniversary.

Steam loco no. 3 with a short train of skips. Fireman poses with coal shovel and oil can.

Now that everything has settled back to normal, I'm having a little time at the work table again. I promise to have some finished modelling projects on the blog in the near future. More images from the anniversary in this Flickr-folder.