Hi all,

Many many years ago I procured a copy of a VHS video that I presume was produced by Märklin for English-speaking agents around the world and I suspect I acquired this copy from the NZ agent at the time or via our club.

I used to have it playing on a Panasonic VHS all-in-one Player sited near our exhibition layout. The player packed up some time ago, would not Rewind or Fast-Forward but in a fit of enthusiasm I fixed it the other night so that I could archive some of these old videos along with the family ones to check before trashing.

I reckon this one is pretty cool and gives a lot of rarely-seen snippets of factory production including design, moulding, painting, assembly, testing, even the making of M-track. Way too interesting to keep to myself!

I've uploaded it to Youtube and hope some of you will find it enjoyable. Sorry for the quality in parts, that's old technology for you. I have a suspicion that the original or at least the copy my copy was made from may exist somewhere in our club library so I will keep an eye out and if it's better I'll update.

As best I can tell this video is not already available online in any form but if anyone knows of a better example, especially the original in German please post a link.

In the meantime, enjoy this trip down memory lane - nearly 19 minutes so make yourself a cuppa :-)

Comments and feedback welcome

Cookee

Hi Cookee, very interesting film and in English. Nice to see the various stages. I liked the m track part. Id love to have some of the workers to fix my crap soldering work. Thanks for showing. Take care Eddie

Hello Cookee,

Thanks for posting this video - very interesting history.

Regards,

PJ

Great video/film, thanks for posting it.

Hi cookee

A wonderful look back at the 70s.

I like the way the engine is tested - reversed at high speed and left skidding for traction. Just pure dead brilliant.

Mike

VERY GOOD. Its great to see how some of my models were made. many thanks.
Dereck

Hi cookee
Thanks for the trip down memory lane, and thanks to Markus. I knew I had seen the film sometime in the past and now I remember it was in the cinema at the Marklin museum in the early eighties !
Regards,
Howard.

Cheers Cookee,

Thanks heaps for that finally got around to watching all of it.

I might have a go at downloading it and see if up-scaling it and running thru a filter "might" improve it a bit. Have my doubts as every copy deteriorates but worth a punt.

EDIT;

Well asides from wasting a few hours on about a dozen try's the best I can manage is to boost the audio and get rid of a bit of the noise, also bumped it up to 720x576p.

If you want I can upload it to YouTube, I ended up with 2 versions....
1st is 50% Audio boost and still 4:3, some noise removed/reduced.
2nd is another 50% Audio boost and ended up in 16:9 due to seeing what would happen if I re-sampled it to 1920x1080 than back to 576p in an attempt to get rid of more noise with marginal success.
both are 180Mb

Edited by user 10 March 2016 08:23:01(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Hi cookee,

Just a small addition: The film must have been made in 1975 or 1976. Only in these two years Märklin made the 4093+4094 (27 cm baggage car + diner) in pop-colours while the 4091 and 4092 were made already in blue/cream.

Regards

Markus