BlueBrixx Train Passenger Trolley Rheingold DB Set 101341

BlueBrixx's Passenger Car Rheingold DB is a BlueBrixx-Specials model built from 476 blocks, measuring 35.5 × 5 × 9.5 cm assembled. Age 14+. No stickers or prints. Instructions are supplied as a free download after registering.

Check the length before you build a train

BlueBrixx has made Rheingold carriages in two different sizes, and they do not belong in the same rake.

This car is 35.5 cm long. The later four-axle carriages — sets 104284, 104286 and 104287, marked (8w) — are 50.5 cm. Coupled together the difference is unmissable: the roofline steps, the windows do not line up, and the train reads as two trains.

Neither generation is wrong. Pick one and stay with it. This one is the shorter, earlier and cheaper series, and set 103049 is its revised version with larger windows.

The first Rheingold was for people arriving by ship

The Rheingold of 1928 is a different train from the beige-and-blue one of 1962, and its purpose was specific.

It ran from Hook of Holland to Basel, and the timetable was built around the night ferries from Harwich. British and American tourists stepped off a boat in the Netherlands and onto a train with reclining armchairs, a kitchen, and a route down the Rhine past the Lorelei and the castles — arriving in Switzerland the same evening.

It was violet and cream, first and second class only, and supplement-fare. The German railway was competing for foreign currency at a time when it badly needed some, and the train was designed to be photographed and written about. It worked: the Rheingold became the reference for what a European luxury express was.

It stopped in 1939 and returned in 1951.

In the BlueBrixx range

Sets 101344 (Humpback Dining Car) and 103049 (revised passenger car) are the same generation. Set 104283 is the BR 103 locomotive.

Specifications

Pieces: 476 · Series: BlueBrixx-Specials · Age: 14+ · No stickers · Instructions as free download
Model dimensions: 35.5 × 5 × 9.5 cm (14.0 × 2.0 × 3.7 in)