During my years working at the University of Kiel I was deeply involved in design, construction and maintenance of the computer science model railway and its control software. Why does a computer science department, or more precisely its chair of computer organisation, need a model railway? The model railway was used to study, illustrate and teach many different aspects in the orderly collaborative behaviour of large scale asynchronous concurrent systems. As such the model railway was a quite nice abstraction of much larger and more complex system in the real world as much as more virtual systems like computer operating systems. And it was quite some fun as well...
We used the model railway in teaching a series of lab courses on system organisation in the late 1990s and early 2000s. After the retirement of Prof. Werner Kluge, the initiator of the project, the model railway is now in use by the Chair of Real-Time and Embedded Systems for teaching more hardware-related phenomena. Information on the current state of the model railway can be found here; some more detailed information in German is available here.
By clicking on the above picture, you will find the original documentation of the model railway, which is kept here rather for reminiscent reasons than practical value. Have fun browsing through the page, but please be aware that some links may simply be broken over time.
Dr. Clemens Grelck