Die Geschichte von PIKO

you don't want anyone to say yes yes model railway what is that a toy isn't it I never rode with my mother I've only done crafts since I can remember I know railways and Pico Woltmann's first railway became one there Real railway models, says technology historian and specialist journalist Franz Recht. We only have to give credit to the designers of Pico, the carriers of ideas of the VFB Co, for having known how, I would say, to make the main enthusiasts see that model railways are not toys, but rather consumer goods, which even required scientific considerations in their development.

Many peak models from the 1950s bear the signature of Karlheinz Brust: express train cars, freight cars or steam locomotives. The Sonneberg employee from the beginning is now 86 years old and started working on January 1, 1952. The most important thing in his designs were exact scales, so his locomotives and carriages responded perfectly to the new demands. with CVP Co with Car he became a pioneer in construction. We had ideas about what we wanted to do. We had also talked about a temptation that we all had. For a small program we made what was supposed to be a tractor and a locomotive. a steam locomotive, an electric locomotive and André rescued, the developers decided on the four-axle diesel wagon VT 137.

In 1952 it began to be mass produced. Here the world of Pico's early years is animated again. Peter Heumos of Zeuthen had the idea for this unusual rail history lesson, so the material found on the system is actually from the early 1950s. The system itself was not built until 2002. The tracks Wooden sleepers that are integrated into the system are a product of the K+K company. atlas again, which he produced for the figure, he is particularly proud of his first fico machine, the streamlined curls e101 was under the christmas tree for him in 1950, you shouldn't think it was possible, but nothing broke, but the locomotive works Like the first day.

Of course, after so many years it has to be dismantled and cleaned, but nothing broke on the locomotive, as if by a miracle, although the frame and the casing are made up of ten groups, the interest rate did not drop beforehand and "The lottery Old Kleins continues to shine, each model is a contemporary witness, each model has its own story. This case was also developed in Chemnitz. At that time a series 64 was planned to be released on the market, but since then it would probably have some problems with the pre-order , Bio never made a 64. But in the meantime they developed a quad-coupled motor, specifically this one, so they simply put the already existing zinc housings of the 64 series on top of a quad-coupled motor and then called the whole 81 series, a locomotive that never existed in the first place when they were 72.

With eight pieces on display, the H0 1 87 scale miniature world is always densely surrounded. It is the surf of children who look at the installations and intuitively recognize that the real toy was the which was produced 60 years ago for children and who are mostly older people. Sometimes your eyes light up and you stand in front of it and you realize, oh yeah, that was my railroad too when I was a kid. The history of Sonneberger Pico begins in this factory at the former VW Oberlind electrical installation. Later, the company looks towards the city center, where there is now free space to walk.

Hundreds of people were there. The coveted toys were used. In 1962 VW Pico was founded. The mere brand became the name of the company. René Wilfer believed and believes in the fascination of small trains. He bought Pico from the consortium in 1992. On April 30 he signed the contract the next day he took a look at Sonneberg after the first day when we arrived here everything was there again my wife and I walked here for the first time everything was quiet on the first day There was no one working there and we took a look at our new store and were a little surprised.

So, what could be found here with old machines and a lot of dirt and a lot of garbage in the corners, we already had something loaded. Even with the products of that time, in addition to the light, there was a lot of shadow. The peak quality was quite comparable in terms of details and also in terms of quality, they were on the same level, sometimes even a little better than what was available in the West. As for the quality of the drives, as for the quality of the materials, they were nowhere near the quality of the West German product.

Quality: this was the first task for this 62-year-old man, who caught up with the best in the sector. Pico surprisingly presented its first garden railway model in 2006. Bernd Möschl, a native of Sonneberg, heads the corresponding development department. Work on the new one is very advanced and will be delivered in the autumn after the works. , bernd möschl changes his black polo shirt for the blue one of the railway friends of Sonneberg and the promoter of model railways becomes a player in the model railway club founded in his hometown in 1966. It is clear that in the club they mainly roll peak material .

About 20 years ago they already had it in public circles. Starting with their club facilities on a scale of 187, the men around their president Ralf Kalb had planned something analogous, but the new technology did not stop at model railways, then the first open house took place in the school. in 1999 and it had to be done overnight, it was said that of course, we are always allowed to exhibit our online there when it is presented to half the republic with the highly competitive teams for it and at that time we said that We would simply present everything Now, anyway we had the idea before for a short time, but the qualification forced us to an old system.

I love the Piko v 180 diesel locomotive, just silent, digitally, offers perfect sound, it's a shame model railroaders can't. impress any woman with this trick at the moment we have no more women in the past, unfortunately they have also arrived and that is why men regularly return when the friends of the Sonneberg railway are called on a special mission, for example for cleaning time and repair in the German toy museum. The association has been dealing with the miniature railway system for years, there is also a real Pico railway, a company knife object from the 80s. The biggest problems are, as everywhere, model railway still dust among the dust today different things always logically the appearance wears out because friends are still several kilometers away Portman theories or vacations there is a lot of activity and electricity is everything if you have the latest thing that is more than 30 years old and there you have to calculate that I have to to intervene.

Above all, men have to intervene when a locomotive like this series 82 runs out of power, but with the special you have a FICO employee in the club who takes the defective engine to the repair department: the last big thing The developer of railways Bert Pöschl was a hexagonal electric locomotive, the so-called crocodile Peschl has spent his entire professional life at Pico. Development started in 1999 with the professor and me. I've been watching it since 2001. I work here in the development department for it. The dream job was already when he was a school student, he worked at Pico during the holidays and played with Pico tracks at home.

Today he is 33 years old and develops them himself. The apple does not fall far from the tree. Maybe you are genetically predisposed. Grandpa and Grandpa have oranges on the big tree. Today I'm with the big tree and it's just technology, I'm very interested in technology and there's just one thing and another Egon Jacoby was Pöschl's predecessor in the development office. He wanted to build airplanes in the GDR. The program was interrupted. He discovered the technique of model railways and in 1962 started at VBB Pico. The VP choir was created from a document about toys, which means that the toys were closely related and responsible for it, or Erich Honecker, who also arrived at Sonneberg at that time and set the course for almost three decades.

Jako, as the visible face of the Pico models, shaped the locomotives and the carriages were mainly destined for the GDR and socialist countries abroad, but they had no objection to some models being able to bring currency. Unfortunately I can't say what the percentage was. There were not large quantities, but at least we had a representative company in Nuremberg, the Schreiber company, which supplied us with the entire German market. Among the Pico models that circulated in the West was the steam locomotive of the series 66. The Sonnebergers took as their model an authentic one that also attracts the Federal Railways.

For the series 38, the Saxon carriage was in green, in the former Federal Republic the railway newspaper from Fürstenfeldbruck wrote at the time, i.e. Willi Corsa, no known railway model, wrote about this carriage when he tested it in our case. In any case, the car lives up to its name: it ran without problems for about ten hours of continuous operation. Anyone who frequently buys the new Pickerl will have a lot of fun behind the wheel of the Opel Corsa for just under 200 German marks. At the end of the 60s, Pico was the most important manufacturer of Hanno Bahn in the GDR, but there were competitors, Goldschicht or Oscar, these brands disappeared from the market at the beginning of the 70s.

From then on, most products They were sold under the brand name Sonneberg. Here we have three examples: the BN 150, the 75 51 Saxon Series Model based on the Saxon model and the 86 series, as you can see from the packaging, all come from Pico. Experts know, of course, that all three models were manufactured in Zwickau, specifically by the manufacturer, which since 1971 was called VW Eisenbahn Modellbau Zwickau and, if you carefully examined a package, it was always there. The manufacturer of the 86 series, VW, model railway construction, Zwickau Pico was the leading company and therefore Pico was printed on it, which means that not everywhere where it was said organic there was also organic.

At the VBB there were around 1,600 employees at the end of the GDR. Egon Jacoby was head of development as an engineer. He always had the highest demands on the quality of his model railway, but could not always meet them. For example, we see the load control that we used for the first time on the BR 01, which caused us a lot of problems from customers because parts would break. It works by touch and there were always very minor breaks that could have been ruled out if the proper material had been available. It is a peripheral phenomenon in the history of Fiko, the futuristic Transrapid-style railway.

Sonneberg's model is much older. that that Christian Young Hahn White wanted brown metal prices also at that time what was available to me at that time developed them to build rails that later became the toy that you made famous because we are also on the rise, we can see them. in the catalog until 1965 and a hydraulic plant Christian Jung Hahn is director of his own museum of small models in Waldenburg. His H0 installation, in the style of the 50s and 60s, seems old-fashioned. The tracks and buildings are all from Back then, like the rolling stock. This is something very special.

It was my father's first train that I bought back in 1956. It was a Pico company stopping pack with 80 baggage cars and two passenger cars, a real old branch line car manufactured by Pico since 1963. The model almost 50 years it is still reliable and whatever it is, it is a semi-robust technology and I can say that it breaks relatively little. which may have attracted attention because there are no more, it seemed to clean and then run and run and run and run, also from the 60s the green electric locomotive and the silver Knox pico steel wagons wanted to become big with it in France .

Christian Junghann The museum is currently under construction. The boss is expanding the facilities for the 70s and 80s. His Waldenburg model railway world is open three times a week and he is always talking. Visitors learn all over again the big and small stories about the model railways of the GDR. His quiet friend Jörg Krautheim shared his passion for model railways. The turner from Leuna has been collecting old locomotives and carriages for 15 years. His apartment is now also a museum of sorts, but the treasures remain hidden from the public. He normally would have done it, for example.

For example, the NOAA Pico, built from 1961, in the shades of red for Denmark, green for Belgium, light red for Hungary and, meanwhile, the silver version, which was very striking and was also manufactured with electricity . Basically, things that only come from models. The differences are not only external: in this chassis, which was manufactured around the year 61, rubber drives were used, that is, without gears, a drive followed directly the rollers. Later in 1964, NAB came with geared motors, which were later used in this one as well. Use the French SNCF 7001 viaof the Internet, stays in touch with like-minded people and always seeks information that goes beyond the knowledge of the common model railroader.

This is how he found the unusual story of an unusual freight wagon, these are the so-called Karl Kübel wagons, which were not currently manufactured in series, which is why the ingenious inventor from the DMV model railway association came. After the fall of the Berlin Wall Berlin, with the idea of ​​producing it as a pop craft sheet, Pico has acquired this car and builds it with excellent quality. Pico model of the 56 series in one of the largest model railways. in central Germany, in Hohensicht, near Flora, and in just four years he became railway director at Hüttinger.

In just four years he laid three and a half kilometers of track and installed 220 switches so that the display models from his grandfather's father's collection could finally disappear. They were relatively complete. I think that almost no rolling stock was found because the GDR times were not compatible. Most of the time there are many organic models and others that are taken out of the box after 20 years, put on the railway and also have short starting difficulties, quite normal in good condition, sometimes there are problems with newer models Greetings to the ladies, the head of the company Wilfer, traveling in his kingdom, doing everything at the end of the month, making model railways.

It also means in the 21st century partly manual work, especially in assembly and mainly in the hands of women nothing has changed some of them have been for decades ip co brigitte eichhorn example since 1972 today I make the crocodile that secretly knocks on the home In Tchibo, In Sonneberg, there are 160 jobs, three quarters of them occupied by women, another 400 people work in the new pico factory in China. We certainly have an advantage in China. Of course, we also have a disadvantage, like you have to control everything in detail, you have to be behind almost all the works, you have to have an inspector there for about three years since then, my technical manager and I take turns to fly over them monthly.

We have managed to keep the company running efficiently and since last year we have also been profitable and I think that is a relatively good achievement after three years. All the little trains have to leave at the end towards the people. A few years ago, the model railway specialist shouted at René Wilfer, the package was first launched through a discount store instead of, as usual, through specialized stores. The storm of indignation It was for him, the boss from the beginning, one in the glass of water, however, it did not take long until the specialist realized that for him this was the best thing that could happen to him, that thousands of starts were sold and that people could continue with the hobby.

Yes, what do they do because they can? "They don't go to discount stores to buy caterpillars and so on, they go to specialized stores. This 62-year-old man perfectly masters the marketing keyboard. Every year he goes to the Nuremberg toy fair with new glasses and gets everyone's glasses. attention Throughout the industry there are now a number of eye-catching models always at the service of the company glasses iq you ask what the peak means what year it was you should look in the catalogs is it all there or does antiquity still remember the glasses that a pair of glasses that I have back then, my friend did what I did back then.

How we came out with the pickaxe was the best publicity. Barth wants to have his photos on his nose or you can see what he doesn't have, which are also very nice glasses, which are the ones here and there up there If you use the dose, you can move it René Wilfer believes that electric train models are far from being left out. He shares the optimism that he is not for you. With computers or game consoles, the golden age of small trains is over. Personally, I think that the model railway hobby is not for anyone and will grow, so when you look at the evolution of prices, you are afraid of the game. ball that appears almost out of nowhere without really offering the children of our youth something they can afford The former development director of Pico won Jacobi, in the future the railway model does not offer many facets of employment, starting with the model itself, Which one or the other likes to play with electricity, electronics, construction or landscaping, there is an incredible variety of possibilities