Sometime during 1958 I was making my monthly pilgrimage to J. Searle's model train and hobby shop in Pitt St. Sydney. I was thirteen years old and was paying off a lay-by of a Märklin DT800 train I had seen the previous year. It was a huge investment for me, the price was £9/10/-, my salary at the time from an after school chemist run was £1/10/- per week. I was also paying off a new Speedwell push bike which cost £35/-/-, I was stretched pretty thin.
Mr. Searle always had a good stock of free Märklin catalogues at the door, I took one and headed home after paying 10/- off my lay-by. Paging through the catalogue I came to a page that stopped me in my tracks [sorry about that]. It was the Märklin V200, 3021 in the catalogue, for some reason this bull nosed locomotive really appealed to me even at the price of £8/13/11, I just had to have one as soon as the DT800 was paid off. I still have the 1958 catalogue and price list, the following scan is of the page that started this journey.
I did pay the DT800 off and it has proved to be a great investment but we moved interstate so my regular visits to Searle's stopped and my plan to buy the V200 was put on hold. Also at that point everything changed, I started full time work at 14 and then life took over. Work, cars, travel, more work, family and then a lot more travel mainly for work. My interest in trains never faded, I have traveled thousands, no tens of thousands of kilometres on trains, mainly in China and more recently in Germany.
In 2015 we were traveling by train between Trier and Freiburg, on the way we passed through the town of Göppingen, it didn't mean anything to me until very briefly the Märklin factory flashed past, I had no idea where the factory was located until we passed through that town. Memories of model trains, Searles and the V200 briefly surfaced and then the file was archived again.
On the last two days of our journey through Germany we stayed in the beautiful small city of Speyer, one of the reasons was to visit the excellent technical museum there and the other was to cycle from Speyer to Heidelberg and back. We spent almost a full day at the museum, Germany does tech. museums very well and this one is well worth a visit. You can see photos from the museum here. They have a huge selection of cars, motorbikes planes, trains and even one of the Russian space shuttles. Most of the trains are located inside but while we were exploring behind the main hall we came across a vision from 1958, a real, although not fully functioning V200. It did look a bit unloved but it really stirred up some great memories for me.
The plan for the following day was to ride to and from Heidelberg via Hockenheim race circuit, about 65kms. in total. On the way back we passed through a small town called Eppelheim, there were multiple choices for us to pass through the town so we chose a quiet back street, most of the shops were closed for lunch, one of which was a well stocked model train shop in a residential street away from the main shopping area. What are the chances of finding a model shop in that location but only to find that it's closed. Now it starts to get a bit spooky, first the Märklin factory, then the V200 at the tech museum and now a Märklin shop, closed but with a bundle of free Märklin catalogues on a stand by the door. I couldn't help myself so added the 2015 one to the 1956, 57 and 58 copies I had at home. This featured a range of older models re released for a 25 year anniversary, although some were much older than 25 years. Paging through the new catalogue there it was again, a V200, out of all of the hundreds of models that the factory had produced in the past 57 years for some reason they had selected the V200.
I almost received one as a birthday gift last year but the new price converted to almost $600. A crazy price and probably a good reason why the company is now bankrupt.
I had closed the mind archives on the V200 again but a few weeks ago I was trawling through the back lots of my memory and it popped up again. Ebay, maybe I could find a second hand one at a reasonable price, $102 including postage from Germany was a deal I could not refuse, not after 58 years and those three quite amazing coincidences over four days. The God of model trains must have been losing patience with me.
More information about the full size V200 here.
Finally, 58 years later it has joined the DT800.
