After the official part of my recent German beer trip ended, I had a few days to myself before heading back across the pond. So one day, Peter Reid (who publishes Modern Brewery Age) and I took a Deutsche Bahn train to nearby Salzburg, Austria to visit the original Trumer Brauerei (more about that trip soon). On the train, I was idly paging through the train’s on-board magazine Mobil (sort of like an in-flight magazine) when I came across a multi-page ad for a toy store chain, Idee+Spiel. Based on the number of pages and locations listed, I imagine it’s something like the Toys R Us of Germany. On the page with toy trains, there were pictured accessories by a German company called, with no irony, Busch (or more properly Busch Gmbh and Co.). Two of the products shown were a Beer Garden and a Hopyard. I imagine neither of these HO-scale train accessories will ever see the light of day here in neo-prohibitionist America, but I love the idea that these scenes are so common that nobody in civilized Europe has a problem with them.
The Busch model HO-Biergarten.
The Busch model HO-Hopfen.
Visiting their website, I also discovered that Busch has a few more beer-related accessories for train layouts, and the hop field is featured on the cover of their catalog.
Busch’s 2007 catalog.
The other accessories included this barley field.
Notice the hops in the field across the road? If you look back the hopyard picture, you can now see the barley field there, too.
I love way the person on the bench is sitting. The catalog refers to him as a “happy ‘carouser.’”
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November 20th, 2007 at 7:46 am
This is great. When I was little my dad built a huge model railway in our spare room. Me and my brother adored it. It was a sad day indeed when my mum made him break it up. Cheers for posting it.
However I am going to pull you up on this statement:
“there were pictured accessories by a German company called, with no irony, Busch ”
arrgggh! American-centicism unbound! As if the use of a Germanic surname as a company name would in any circumstances be an ironic reference to a US brewer!!
November 20th, 2007 at 7:48 am
This is great. When I was little my dad built a huge model railway in our spare room. Me and my brother adored it. It was a sad day indeed when my mum made him break it up. Cheers for posting it.
November 20th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
This really is too cool. It makes me want to get a whole HO setup just so I can have the hops and barley gardens in there. Maybe I can incorporate them into the kids’ dollhouse or something…
I think we in America can find the irony that as many hops as are in that hopyard would last our dominatrix Anheuser-Busch about fifty years, perhaps the barley as well. Where are the rice paddies? This whole thing must have nothing to do with A-B.
Finally, the happy carouser is cool, but you gotta love that Oktoberfest-style beer server, with two handsfull (or is it handfulls?) of mugs. Also, can you zoom in further on the bines? Are those Tettnangers or what?
November 30th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Stonch, simmer down. The irony was not simply that they had a common German name, but that they chose to have a beer garden, hop farm and barley farm in their product line and their name is Busch, who has an actual hop farm, the Busch Hop Farm, in the Hallertau region of Bavaria. We actually visited the Busch Hop Farm a few days before, so I’m sure it was on my mind. Do you really think that the German Busch company wasn’t aware of the beer company? They may be based on my fair shores, but they’re a global company. We now live in a world of irony, state-centric thinking is passe.
December 29th, 2007 at 4:41 am
Heh, makes me want to dig out my old railway stuff and build a new layout, just to include these accessories