A short Swiss Campaign

While our trip to Northern Italy to visit the Hobby Model Expo 2025 in Milan, we were so close to Swiss border that we decided to visit a couple of places with 'Garden Railways' in Southern Switzerland too:

Galleria Baumgartner

Galleria Baumgartner is located in Mendrisio in Southern Switzerland, just on the Swiss side of the Italian border. Galleria Baumgartner is a hughe collection of 4000+ model railway locomotives and rolling stock from many different manufacturers in many, if not all, scales and gauges, but mostly larger gauges like O, 1 and G. The collection is based on the late Bruno Baumgartner's private collection and spans from the dawn om railway modelling to modern items. There are some naval and military models and miniatures in this big collection too along some few model railway layouts in different scales and gauges:

This is a view from the mesanin at the upper level and down to the ground floor:

This is also from the mesanin but from the other side. Everything seen along the walls and in the midle of the ground floor is not an old 'telephone central' but display cabinets full of exclusive models. More than 4000 of them. Many of them are limited editions made in Switzerland:

On the lower floor there are even more display cabinets with models, but here they're also about to build several layouts:

Some of the ships in their naval collection:

They were also displaying old Swiss miniature soldiers and military toys:

Here are some impressions of what to see in some of those cabinets:

It's incredible that these 'small' pre-ballasted tracks in 10mm and 13mm gauge are made just after WW2. These models was ahead of their time

Very old 1 or 0 gauge military rollingstock. These might sparks some ideas to modelling-projects in G-scale or 16mm scale 

A much newer but really expensive locomotive in 0 gauge

As mentioned they were building some new large layouts on the lower floor, but they also have some operating layouts already:

A H0 layout by the entrance to the museum

0 Gauge depot display 

0 Gauge. Narrow Gauge to the left and Standard Gauge to the right

A Z-scale (1:220) layout

A H0 layout. The Z-scale layout is integrated in it as a 'background'

A N-scale layout

Here are some short videos. The first layout was  G-scale and running a top of the display cabinets between the ground floor and upper level:

A very simple but yet a classical 'German layout':

These images are from the Gauge 1 layout currently under construction on the lower level:

The Postman is not having a good day

There were also a small exhibition on Swiss Postal Service. This one was from WW2:

They also had simple layouts kids could operate with remote controlls:

The Museum shop:

And a lovely Café (with not only coffee):

Despite displaying very exclusive models in the collection, I found and bought a very cheap Chinese copy of a LGB G-scale tank wagon in their shop. I'll guess I'm going to cover this wagon in another future blogpost. 

SwissMiniatur 

Just a couple of stations further north from Mendrisio is Melide. In Melide the SwissMiniatur exhibition park have been located since 1959. SwissMiniatur is a open air collection of signature and famous Swiss buildings in 1:25 scale, connected with a scratchbuilt 1:25 scale garden railway:

Look close on this photo and you will se the prototype for this model in the background

Zürich airport from which we travelled through when we were in Friedrichshafen last year 

Swiss Narrow Gauge railways in the mountains:

This should be familiar

The public could go behind the scenes to see how they scratchbuilt their trains...

...and the buildings:

Yet another busy day on our tour, but we all agreed that it was a good one!

When I came home from our club-tour to Italy and Switzerland, I saw that I've been receiving a package in the meantime. Matchbox 1:76 originals found on a Norwegian online market site for only £ 32, $ 42, or € 36. I think some of these are small to be 1:76 scale (especially the Americans) and that they look good next to H0 scale figures: