The absence of the train driver | Two years ago, my father-in-law passed away unexpectedly. He had two hobbies and passions: cooking and model railroading. He never had a model railway as a child because his parents couldn't afford it. However, he fulfilled this wish later in life as an adult. The model railway is in the cellar; it was a »winter hobby«. The background was painted by his older daughter, Bettina. Anja, the younger one, built the houses. As a pensioner, he visited model railway fairs, and the collection grew. He discovered eBay. He selected, and Anja made the purchases. At almost eighty, he independently created a Paypal account and now bought without the help of others - the collection continued to grow. Now, the trains have been stationary for nearly two years. The house has been emptied during this time, leaving only the model train in the basement behind. Upon inspection, it appears someone had been working on it and took a break. The tracks and landscape are visible, but it's clear that the work was unfinished and in a state of flux. Buildings obstruct the tracks, and signs have toppled over, leaving the exact plan and stage of completion a mystery. A closer look reveals his concept: It was all about driving, shunting, and planning routes. The rails dominate the layout; a village is only hinted at. In front of the table are the speed controllers and switches connected to the tracks by an obscure tangle of cables under the table. On the other hand, he planned everything meticulously. I found over twenty layouts of track plans and lists of train compositions drawn with unique stencils on various papers. The locomotives and trains are now in my flat, waiting to be sold. When I started working on this subject, I wanted to save the traces of an aspect of this man's life. Visually, The viewer should slip into the role of someone (perhaps a child) who discovers the model landscape, like somebody who enters an abandoned house with a torch, pointing the light beam here and there to get a clearer view of specific detail and starts to think of the person who built it. Over time, I saw that there is something as Neil Gaiman describes it in »Neverwhere«. In this novel, a »London above« is accompanied by the mysterious, eery »London below«. In my case, above is a structured miniature landscape and precisely labelled switches, but below is an impenetrable cable tangle with current paths that only the designer could understand. While asking myself how and in which ways he constructed the electrical circuits and made them work, I realised this tangle of cables represents not only chaos but also stands for energy. This was the start of adding blue to black and white. To quote Rebecca Solnit: »The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.« (Solnit 2017, pp. 63,64) I will add a quote by Walter Benjamin, which also describes what thoughts these cables, these traces triggered in me: »Trace and aura. The trace is the appearance of a closeness, however distant that which it left behind may be. The aura is the appearance of a distance, however close that which it evokes may be. In the trace, we become aware of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us.« (Benjamin 2020, p. 560) I will end with something more concrete: the plans also reproduced as cyanotypes. This technical process is reminiscent of the copying technique called "Blaupause," which was used for engineering or technical drawings in the first half of the 20th century. With this, his model railway will be history soon, documented in its last state as a memory of him. The project is still in progress, and some legacy components, particularly the trains, still need to be addressed. Additionally, the cyanotypes created from the cables appear to be taking on a life of their own, and what implications this will have over time remains to be seen. References: GAIMAN, Neil 2005. Neverwhere. London: Headline. SOLNIT, Rebecca. 2017. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Edinburgh: Canongate. BENJAMIN, Walter. 2020. Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2: Das Passagen-Werk. 9. Auflage. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.