How it all started
We are group of railroad modelers from Zagreb which share interest in American themed model railroading. “El Peso Railroad” team consists of small group of enthusiasts who have been friends for many years.
We all live in Zagreb, Croatia and are members of the oldest and for the most of the time of its existence the only one model railroading club in Croatia – KZMZ (www.kzmz.hr).
Core team members are (in alphabetical order):
◾Dubravko Kuhta
◾Borislav Rajčević
◾Oliver Tržok
◾Davor Vinčić
Team members who are helping us and take part in our activities:
◾Nikola Kolarek
El Peso Railroad Project
Our friendship and interest for modelling of USA railroads connected us on this El Peso project.
This all led to a visit to 2. US-Modellbahn-Convention in October 2011 in Rodgau, Germany (convention site). From that moment we started to fiddle with the idea of participating in one of the future conventions. We started to plan a modular layout that would be doable in our time and also to gather interested club members.
We made a rough plan and bought all the material in spring of 2012 and started putting modules together with the idea of participation in 2013 Convention.
Among all the other commitments we had, both with club and work, initial fast start soon led to a much slower and (over)casual approach until we almost stopped all works by the end of that year.
Idea was still there and we frequently discussed it.
We visited Zürich Convention in 2012 which gave us additional motivation and we spent some time during the 2013 planning on resurrecting the modular layout idea.
Locale of the layout is somewhere in south-western part of the US and era is roughly transition (fifties). Even if the the era and locale is only roughly defined we have pretty much defined “history” and locations behind our fictional El Peso RR.
We decided to name the layout and railroad “El Peso Railroad” because it sounded south-western. Word Peso is not typo, it is derived from Croatian (slang) word for a dog.
No turning back now…
On our visit to 4. Convention we met with Horst Meier who is organizing those events and discussed our participation. We established some deadlines and got additional boost to our efforts.
In the beginning of 2014 we managed to free ourselves of some club activities and as the deadlines approached we focused on our modules.
We started working at least twice a week in Davor’s garage and managed to keep this pace throughout most of the summer and autumn.