Project information

Another African project I am dreaming of. Asmara is at one end of the Eritrean Asmara - Massawa line. It has a small railway station that has a lot going on: there is people travelling, freight cars being shunted around and a sweet little workshop for maintenance of the steam traction. The line uses a 950mm gauge (3 ft 1 3⁄8 in), I will model it in H0m, which is the nearest gauge available in scale 1:87.

The trackplan was made using google-map satellite foto's of Asmara railway station. By using it as the underground of a table, you can just put the tracks on it. This feature is not yet available in TRAX3D - but it will be soon because I use it a lot myself.

Eritrea was an Italian colony for a while. And it shows. The buildings in Asmara have a distinctive Italian style, and the railway line is serviced by Italian rolling stock, like the Littorina railbus you see below. Also typical for this line, are the mallets that are used for pulling both freight and passenger trains.

​For this layout, I do not plan to scratch build any material, here I will just stick to modifying existing products. Rivarossi has this nice Isabella diesel railbus in 16.5mm gauge. Weinert has a range of H0m Mallets that resemble the Eritrean locomotives quite closely.

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