More of my Battle of Berlin game items. This is the office for my Luft Hansa company building.





The furniture is resin, metal and styrene. The floor is sheet styrene painted gold and then dull coated to look like carpeting. Figures are various Preiser in HO scale. I like to mix HO and 1/72nd scale figures to get greater variety. A thick base can help the HO figures look a bit taller and since they are usually civilians they look smaller since they don't have helmets.







The furniture was painted dark flat blue, but the "wooden" parts were then coated in a gloss coat. This technique makes the cloth look like cloth because it is not shiny like the wood.

Airport Fuel Storage Depot

The airline Luft Hansa operated until April 22, 1945 with one last plane flying out of Berlin's Templhof airport two days ahead of the Russians.

I have been building a small Luft Hansa operation for my Battle of Berlin game. Naturally, for airliners, fuel is an important aspect of getting planes ready to fly.

This little fuel storage shack is made up of bits from the spares bin. The floor is sheet styrene with a pattern of squares on it for concrete. The verticals are H bars from Evergreen Plastic. The roof has been sitting in the spares box for about 20 years, who knows where it came from. The barrels are from several companies, including Roco and the fuel pump and hand truck are from Roco. The figure is Preiser.

Berlin TV

The Nazis wanted to exploit all kinds of mass communication and before WWII they developed the Paul Nipkow Television Network. They broadcast regular television shows right up until near the end of the war. There were broadcast studios in several places, including Berlin and the Eiffel Tower.

To simulate the broadcast television studios, I got some of the Preiser TV crew sets. I combined them with other figures for actors, technicians, and news reporters. Using bits of sprue and plastic from the spares box I constructed consoles for editing and monitoring the shows. They could broadcast live and also video tape shows for later broadcast.

The green facade is from a BUM cowboy set. It makes a perfect building for a movie or TV set. Atlantic made some similar buildings.

The figures are mounted on sheet styrene, the camera operators mounted with their cameras. I imagine live TV reports from the outskirts of the city broadcast to the citizens of Berlin, waiting in their bunkers hiding from the Soviet tanks.

The control panel and furniture are from various companies. I actually am working on a building to house the system to include sound stages. TV was generally not watched from the home. They would broadcast a signal via closed circuit and people would go to TV parlours and watch the shows together, like a movie. They did have plans for broadcast TV to the masses but the start of the war put those on hold.

More Wagons Again

My friend COL JIM and I visited our local train shop today and I added to the wagon collection with this great example.

Two massive sturdy looking horses pull this Preiser Rack Wagon #30436. It is a typical farm wagon good for use in Germany from Napoleonic times until next Tuesday. Perfect for WWII. At 31.99 this is not cheap, but a very nice wagon.

This is straight out of the box, fully assembled, painted and detailed. The two figures are great and well painted.

The back of the wagon has several farm tools, rakes and such. This wagon will be added to my collection of wagons for my Berlin project.