My co-conspirator Jim Bell was taking his German engine shed layout to the Northampton show to add some movement to the German Railway Society stand, and so I went along. Strange show, crammed into and around the function space of a hotel - which had been double-booked with a wedding. How do they do this? Some rather nice layouts, though. Whilst at the GRS stand, I spent £40 on a Gutzold class 86 2-8-2T, apparently repainted into a heavily-weathered ÖBB livery representing 86.476. Across the road from the hotel was a market hall, and on the way back from the cashpoint, I called in. Finding a second-hand bookstall, I was delighted to find a copy of Ziel and Eagleson's 1973 photo album 'The twilight of world steam' for the princely sum of £4. Later, leafing through the book and turning to the section on Austria, I found a photograph of a class 86 at Hieflau shed in 1971. Imagine my surprise on looking closer and finding that the engine pictured was 86.476, the model of which I had bought earlier!

The GRS Trent Group has a hut - in the former DDR, it'd be called a 'Dachka' - at Peak Rail's site at Rowsley in Derbyshire. In the early summer of 2002, we held an open day there, and I attended wearing my Austrian Railway Group hat. (Not literally.) Here are some pictures of my Roco BBÖ class 310 bringing the Orient Express (c.1910) onto the layout.

Unedited provisional pictures only.

Pictures from the 30th anniversary show of the TCS. Later pictures will show some of the other layouts, both for 'collectors' and 'serious modellers'!

It all started at Eurospoor.

Whilst trawling the Borse, I spotted a couple of HO coaches that looked very different to the piles and piles of Märklin green four-wheeled balcony coaches that you normally find in Utrecht. I looked and found that they were two Russian 4-wheeled coaches; long-wheelbased, green coaches with a light brown roof with distinctive mushroom ventilators and Soviet-era markings. They had been fitted with a Märklin skate to run interior lighting (apparently quite common amongst Dutch modellers – I saw a lot of other coaches so fitted) and were wired together. The dealer was asking 15 Euro for the pair and I almost snatched his hand off!

Closer examination only deepened the mystery. They carried no manufacturer's name, but were rather nicely made, Interior lighting had been fitted using Roco units, but that was obviously an after-thought. And a quick check with a multi-meter confirmed that they had two-rail wheelsets.

I did some searching on the Net, but found nothing conclusive. Then at the Warley show last December, Andy Hyelman came to me (I was on the Austrian Railway Group stand at the time) to tell me that DJH, Esteemed Purveyors of Locomotive Models to the Gentry, had the full Russian set on their stand for sale!

Sure enough, they had a red-and-yellow box with Cyrillic writing on it. I examined the contents, and it was the full set – an 0-8-0 tender locomotive and two coaches, plus a bag of additional parts and a typewritten contents list (in German). We negotiated a price, and I came away with it. But the mystery only deepened.

The box carried the name “Markscheffel & Lennartz” as well as script in Cyrillic. I checked and soon found that Markscheffel & Lennartz were noted German manufacturers in Gauges O and 1, based in Hamburg, who had gone bust in 2002. This wasn't their usual run of stuff, as far as I could see.

The locomotive is a model of a Russian Class OV 0-8-0 tender locomotive, built between 1889 and 1920; probably more than 8,500 of all variants were built. “O” designated Osnovnoi, meaning 'Basic' or 'Standard'; the locomotive went through a number of different sub-types, often with different valve gear; hence the “V” suffix which stood for “Walschaerts” (in its Russian transliteration). Other types were Od (for “Dzhoi”, or Joy valve gear); OP for a number of engines rebuilt with superheated boilers from 1907; OU rebuilt with higher boiler pressure in 1923; and OCh rebuilt as superheated compounds in 1923 . Although intended for freight traffic, the class O engines could turn their hands to any service (and often had to); they often served in passenger traffic, and there is a photograph of one hauling the Trans-Siberian Express. Because diesel shunters came late to the Soviet Union, many of the class survived in secondary duty into the 1970s. A number of them were lost to Poland after the war of 1919-20 and were regauged; a few of these engines fell into German hands in 1939 and one was seen, dumped as derelict, at Nuremberg in 1952!

Whilst the locomotive is nicely moulded, the underpinnings are all plastic, and the motor is housed in the tender underneath a massive mazak weight representing an improbably large coal load. The gears are all nylon, the unidentified Mabuchi-copy motor can barely move the locomotive along and the whole thing makes a noise described variously as like a coffee grinder or an electric pencil sharpener!

Then I found an account of these models in a 1985 copy of 'Continental Modeller', which told me that the model was manufactured in 1982 by the Kursk concern 'Schetmash'. Originally, these models came as a set and included a circle of track and a controller. Further searches showed that Schetmash was, and still is, a precision manufacturing company, with experience of making instrumentation, calculating machines and computers, and also some plastic moulding work for the automotive industry. But apart from a stock exchange listing which says that they also made "toys", I could find no other reference to the model.

Some of Schetmash's calculators and computers appear to be reverse-engineered from European models; so here was one reason for the quality of the coaches, at least, being so high. I had initially thought that the level of engineering was beyond Soviet-era plastic moulding - certainly, the plastic aircraft kits that came out of the USSR at that time were pretty crude. However, now I see what other business Schetmash were involved in, I've revised that opinion. And indeed, other research I've done on the plastic aircraft kits has shown that those models (based on old Frog moulds acquired by the Russians when Rovex finally went bust in the early 1970s) ended up with, of all people, the Georgian Ministry of Education in Tbilisi. The Soviet education system, apparently, included industrial training for young adults, and the various State Ministries of Education ran factories specifically as vocational training establishments. The plastic kits produced in such “apprentice factories” in Georgia, at least, were poorly-made with some parts incomplete through plastic injection pressures being too low. Schetmash, on the other hand, being involved in high-end precision work, would be able to produce quality work that (visually at least!) could stand comparison with Western manufacturers.

I then found a Russian enthusiast's website run by Alexander Nezhinsky (http://modeltrains.railclub.ru), and one of his correspondents has a picture of the same model Class OV locomotive on a layout, slightly modified. Alexander has since confirmed that Schetmash also did a Russian DR1A dmu and that shares the running characteristics of the steam engine! Apparently, there's nothing wrong with mine - they all run that badly. There were a number of model variants with different tender types for different fuels – Alexander suggests wood and coal and possibly oil (though the latter is unconfirmed.)

None of this answers the question as to how come the locomotive and coaches alone turned up in the pack marked for Markscheffel & Lennartz. I've suggested that they may have made arrangements to import the set into the West, and may even have overprinted the cardboard sleeve for this. If anyone can throw any more light on this interesting set, I'm sure it would be of interest.