Eisenbahnbau Spiel

Eisenbahnbau Spiel ("Construction of a Railway-line") is a building set with grooved wooden pillars and printed cardboard panels, built for a railway layout: a station and some railway buildings. The lid shows a train in front of a station hall with three gables.

It works exactly like French cousin Construction Villageoise: the cardboard slides into grooves in the pillars. The cardboard is thicker here (1.6 - 2 [mm]) and the grooves are wider and deeper.

I could not find the maker, a year or any documentation online. The lid has a German title and an English and (misspelled) French subtitle: "Construction of a Railway-line" and "Constructions pom Chemins de fer".

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The box

Reference:	Box name:	Nr of parts:
-	Eisenbahnbau Spiel	13 cardboard panel types (14 pieces scanned), 7 wooden pillar types

Box facts
Maker	unknown
Box size	25 x 34.5 x 3.5 [cm]
Cardboard	1.6 - 2 [mm]
Pillars	9.5 - 9.9 [mm] square, 4 grooves
Groove	1.7 - 1.9 [mm] wide, 2.8 - 3 [mm] deep

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Available buildings

The lid does not list the buildings. On my photos I see two larger buildings with a slate roof and a small one with a flat roof, and I grouped the loose parts accordingly. The three pink and yellow gables fit the station hall on the lid, which has three gables as well.

Building	Name in the library	Panels
Station	station	front wall, platform wall, gable (2x), slate roof (2x)
Goods shed	shed	window wall, doors wall, timbered gable (2x), slate roof (2x)
Small building (barn)	barn	brick wall (2x), narrow wall (2x), narrow flat roof panel held by two long pillars (115) on two cross beams (38)

The grouping is my interpretation of the photos, not an official parts list.

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Building instructions

No leaflet in my box either. Walls and gables slide into the pillars, and the roofs sit on pillars with slanted ends along the sloping edges of the gables, so the roof can be placed last.

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Parts

The cardboard parts were scanned at 600 dpi. Most scans are cropped tightly, so the parts touch the edge of the scan: all of them are used. One roof was cut a little askew and had a shadow on its edge, so I straightened that scan by hand.

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Some system characteristics

Here a short list of the system characteristics and how they are modelled in the Blender library:

Part types	Original	Library
Pillars	Wood, 9.5 - 9.9 [mm] square, 4 grooves	Box 10 x 10 [mm], no grooves, 7 lengths: 38, 50, 63, 78, 91, 104, 115 [mm]
Pillar ends	Square (115), one slanted end (50, 78, 104), two parallel slanted ends (63, 91), two converging ends (38)	Modelled as measured
Panels	Printed cardboard, 1.6 - 2 [mm]	Solid, 1.8 [mm], whole [mm] sizes
Groove / insertion	2.8 - 3 [mm] deep	Panel sinks 1.5 [mm] into the pillar (my assumption)
Roofs	Cardboard plane held by two pillars along the gable slope	Roof unit: plane + 2 pillars with slanted ends
Bay size	Walls 83 - 167 [mm], gables 89 - 91 [mm] wide	Same

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Building in Blender

The example buildings are assembled from the library parts, panels 1.5 [mm] into the pillars, and placed like on my photo.

3D Models:

The example buildings are exported as a GLB (Sketchfab), including the box bottom and the lid with the original print, next to the Blender library file. Another nice railway toy, and a good companion for the Construction Villageoise set.