Thanks for the warm welcome.
You are right, not ALL German steamers are ugly. This is just a bias that the folks from the southern part of Germany have. In the 1930, when the Reichsbahn took over from the state owned Länderbahn, the prussian way to design locos took over. All the beautiful saxon, bavarian, württemberg etc. engines disappeared.
My favorite engine is the "C" type of the würtembergische Länderbahn.
Smooth lines, no open pipework, looks like imported from the UK, altough it was built at the Maschinenfabrik Esslingen.
My own activities currently go away from building my layout towards building locos. Here are two examples of my activity:
This is the BR85, it is a whitemetal kit manufactured by Weinert, a local supplier of fine HO kits. The kit has been finished a couple of months ago and is fully functional with DCC decoder.
A cinder crane as it was used all over Germany. This is a nickel silver kit etched from a fellow modeller in small quantities. Quite challenging. The flange plate for the cable pulleys are about 0.7*1.2 mm. I built this kit to get an idea of my new resistance soldering unit.
So my plan for the next future is to build a 320 steam loco of the Austrian ÖBB, a precious Gerard kit that was manufactured in the 19080. People say that Gerard designed scale locos rather than scale models. We will see. I will post some pictures.
I assume that I will start to look into a scale7 kit of a UK tank engine. Any proposals what might be a good starter? I have already discovered finney7 and MOK, which seem to be the most up to date designs.
regards
Michael