Göring’s Model Trains

In the early 1980’s while my wife made yet another trip to look at a cathedral (seen one, you’ve seen them all) I took a trip to a really great museum/hobby house that featured an incredible model train layout near Paddington Station.  The London Toy and Model Museum occupied five floors and visitors were led into a working pithead and coal mine model, with lifts, miners, pit ponies, and Davy lamps.  The museum also had large, landscaped working models in which trains whizzed in and out of tunnels and over viaducts.

Sadly, the museum closed in 1999, which only goes to show that I was right, and my wife was wrong—I can still go see Saint Nigel’s Buddhist Bar and Tabernacle or whatever it was, but The Doc has lost her only chance to see a great museum.  (There are rumors that most of the layouts were sold to a museum in Tokyo, but don’t tell my wife.)

There was once another great model train layout—perhaps the largest in the world at that time—but none of us are ever going to see any of it because it was owned by a madman who deliberately destroyed it.  It belonged to Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man, Hermann Göring.

There is something almost too perfectly awful about Hermann Göring’s having a gigantic model railroad at Carinhall, his forest palace retreat.  Of course he did.  Of course, the man with the uniforms, the titles, the pets, the loot, the hunting lodge inflated into a palace, and the incurable need to perform magnificence for visitors also wanted a miniature kingdom in which everything ran on time because he said so. 

The historical record is clear that he really did have a substantial model railway at Carinhall, that he showed it off to important guests, and that it was part of the estate’s larger function as a theater of ego.  The Library of Congress has a 1937 photograph explicitly titled “Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler watching model trains at Carinhall, Templin, Germany,” and another LOC album for 1938 includes views of Göring’s model railroad.  Remaining insurance papers show that Göring insured the layout for $254,000, the equivalent of more than a million dollars today.  Carinhall itself was not some cozy private retreat: it was an ostentatious estate where Göring displayed stolen art, his pet bison, and entertained dignitaries.

So why did he build it?  We do not, so far as I know, have a neat little memo from Göring saying, “I require a vast train layout because I am a vain overgrown child with a passion for theatrical domination.”  But the surrounding evidence makes the motive fairly obvious.  Carinhall was a stage set for self-glorification, a place where Göring curated an image of himself as hunter-prince, art connoisseur, host, strongman, tastemaker, and second-or-third-most-important man in the Reich depending on which week you asked.  The Jewish Museum Berlin describes Carinhall as his “ostentatious” hunting lodge, where he displayed stolen treasures seized from Jewish owners across Europe.  Add to that the photographic evidence that he was showing the trains to Hitler and other guests and the model train layout starts to look less like a simple hobby table and more like one more prop in a power pageant.  It let him be emperor not merely of a forest estate, but of a tiny obedient world under glass and rafters.  One suspects the attraction was obvious: in the model kingdom, unlike in the Luftwaffe, the scheduling problems were manageable.

As for how large it was, the safest answer is: astonishingly large, though not with the kind of museum-grade precision that lets one draw a blueprint today.  The strongest widely repeated figure is that Göring had two train sets at Carinhall totaling about 400 square meters, roughly 4,305 square feet.  That is not a toy on a table.  That is a hobby expanding until it begins to resemble a municipal planning department.  The archival photographs support the existence of multiple substantial installations over time, even if they do not, by themselves, settle every technical detail.  The attic images especially suggest a sweeping layout under steep rafters, while later reporting points to more than one major setup.

There is also the deliciously absurd matter of brand and scale.  Model-train devotees have argued for years about exactly which parts were Märklin and which were Trix (the two prominent German manufacturers of model trains), because even the dictator’s playroom cannot escape specialist debate.  What can be said confidently is that the German Federal Archives catalog a photograph from January 12, 1943, at Carinhall as “Vorführung Trix-Eisenbahn” — a demonstration of a Trix railway — during Göring’s 50th-birthday festivities.  That means at least one documented Carinhall installation was definitely Trix-Express. 

The train layout was important enough to be part of the performance for invited guests, which tells you a great deal about its role in the ecosystem of Göringian vanity.  Even on his birthday, on the very day that the Russian Army launched the counteroffensive at Leningrad, there he was, ushering people over to admire the little trains.  Nero fiddled; Göring seems to have preferred careful track alignment.

Was it the largest model railway in the world at the time?  That is a tempting line, because it sounds exactly like the sort of thing Göring himself would have wanted repeated.  But the evidence I found does not prove a world record.  The 400-square-meter figure certainly makes it enormous and arguably one of the largest known private layouts of its era, but I would stop there.  It is big enough without historical embroidery.  There is no need to gild the lily when the lily already occupies the attic, the basement, and a nontrivial fraction of Brandenburg.  The important point is not that it was definitively number one on some global leaderboard of grown men with soldering irons: it is that it matched the scale and psychology of the estate that housed it—conspicuous, curated, expensive, theatrical, and meant to impress.

And then, of course, he destroyed it.  Or rather, he destroyed the whole world that contained it.  In April 1945, with Soviet forces closing in, Göring ordered Carinhall blown up so it would not fall into Soviet hands.  The Reichsmarschall ordered Captain Frankenberg to destroy the estate, thus,  petrol and explosives were spread through the interior, and the place was blown up as Soviet troops approached.  In one sense the reason was practical: to deny the enemy a trophy, to conceal the scale of the loot, and to prevent capture of the estate as an intact symbol.  In another sense, it was grimly fitting, since regimes built on plunder often prefer arson to accountability.  If he could not keep the stage set, no one else was to inherit the scenery.

That tells us why the train layout vanished too. The trains were not singled out for destruction because Göring suddenly developed a principled objection to excessive toy railroading. They disappeared because they were embedded in the larger destruction of Carinhall itself.  Some model houses that may have belonged to the railway later turned up in a Berlin government depot, but no intact working layout is known to survive on public display.  So, the vast miniature empire died the same way the larger counterfeit empire was dying around it: by collapse, by denial, by frantic evacuation, and by demolition.  The final irony is almost literary.  A man obsessed with arranging the world to flatter himself ended by blowing up even the tiny one.

The Carinhall railway was not just a hobby.  It was a scale model of Göring’s tastes and delusions: lavish, childish, domineering, meticulously staged, and impossible to separate from the machinery of theft and violence that financed the setting around it.  He built it because he liked trains, certainly, but also because he liked the display, the control, and the adoring gaze of guests being shown yet another marvel in the palace of a man who mistook accumulation for grandeur.  It was huge and by the late 1930s and early 1940s it was famous enough to be photographed with Hitler and other visitors.  He destroyed it, or at least doomed it, for the same reason he destroyed Carinhall: because the real world was closing in, and men who make a religion of possession rarely meet loss with dignity.  Sometimes they just blow up the train room.

Alcatraz, You’re Kidding, Right?

President Trump has asked Congress for $152 million to start work on restoring Alcatraz as a federal penitentiary.  This almost has to be a joke. 

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Cuba and had to preface my remarks with an admission that, while I have read and studied Cuba extensively, I’d never traveled there.  This week is a little different, as I’ve been to Alcatraz half a dozen times and I have met former inmates, guards, and even the children of guards who grew up on the island.  I have a bookshelf full of texts about Alcatraz.  In addition, I spent years maintaining aging hotels on Galveston Island which, while not a prison, certainly gave me some experience with aging concrete and plumbing in an ocean environment.

So, let me summarize the conclusion before I present my evidence…. The whole idea of making Alcatraz back into a federal prison is lunacy.  It’s never going to work. 

Let’s start with a very brief history.  Formerly a military fort and prison, The United States Penitentiary Alcatraz opened August 11, 1934, and closed March 21, 1963.  This was a small prison, housing on average just 275 of the most hardened and infamous of federal prisoners. 

Alcatraz was never a very successful prison primarily because it's being an island a little of a mile off the coast of San Francisco, meant that the harsh climate made operating the prison a financial nightmare.  There was not—and still is not—any direct connection to the mainland for water, electricity, or sewage, meaning everything had to be transferred by boat from the mainland.  By the time the prison closed, the daily cost of keeping a single incarcerate prisoner on Alcatraz was more than three times higher than anywhere else in the rest of the federal penitentiary system.   This was the primary reason the prison was closed, and is the primary reason it should never be reopened.

But, let’s ignore the operating cost.  What would it cost to make that aging dinosaur of rust and crumbling concrete ready to reopen?  First, let’s connect the utilities. 

The National Park Service says water and diesel fuel still have to be ferried out, while garbage and sewage are carried back to shore, and the Bureau of Prisons says the old prison was closed in part because nearly one million gallons of fresh water had to be barged weekly to the island.  Using recent Bay-area marine utility projects as rough comparisons, a submarine electric feeder to Alcatraz looks like roughly $5 million to $10 million, and a submarine water line looks more like $15 million to $50 million.  Put less delicately, before a single inmate takes a shower, flushes a toilet, or turns on a light, you are probably staring at $25 million to $70 million just to stop running the place like an offshore camp with boats and generators.

Then comes the sewage, which is where the fantasy starts getting expensive in earnest.  NPS says sewage is still hauled back to the mainland today, and on-site treatment is merely “under study,” so a genuine prison-scale wastewater solution would mean either an on-island treatment system or another serious marine utility project.  Based on the same kind of Bay crossing work and the obvious need for pumps, redundancy, permits, and historic-site constraints, a believable estimate for solving sewage in a permanent way is roughly $20 million to $60 million.  Add that to the water and electric work, and the all-in bill for just giving Alcatraz dependable electricity, potable water, and sewage treatment lands in the neighborhood of $45 million to $130 million.  That’s just to run utilities—we haven’t yet started work on the actual prison.

If Washington seriously tried to resurrect Alcatraz as a prison, the environmental review alone would likely become its own island institution.  Across federal agencies, the median time to complete an environmental impact statement is about 34 months, and even Alcatraz’s much narrower historic-preservation-and-safety program took the National Park Service from a draft EIS in March 2001 to a final EIS in October 2001 and a Record of Decision in 2002.  On top of NEPA, Section 106 review would apply because this is a federal project affecting historic property, and because Alcatraz is a National Historic Landmark the agency must try to minimize harm and bring in additional consultation.  The cheapest part of this circus would probably be the consultants: GAO says a “typical” EIS has been estimated at roughly $250,000 to $2 million, with DOE’s median EIS contractor cost at $1.4 million.  In plain English, before the first prisoner got his commemorative iron cot, Uncle Sam could easily spend a few years and low-single-digit millions just producing the paperwork explaining why this was a terrible idea.

And let’s not forget about asbestos:  Alcatraz is not some quaint old ruin sprinkled with a charming dusting of historical fibers.  The National Park Service says structures on the island are assumed to contain asbestos and lead-based paint until proven otherwise.  The problem is that there does not appear to be a clean public estimate for “remove all asbestos from Alcatraz and call me when it’s done.”   There is a similar project already underway at Golden Gate Park, so using those numbers I’ll hazard a semi-educated guesstimate and say it will cost about $7 million to remove the asbestos enough that remodeling and repair can begin.

But wait, there is one more step!  The buildings are almost a century old, and they need to be stabilized to prevent collapse from seismic activity.  Here, we can use fairly precise numbers, since the National Park Service has just run the numbers to do exactly that.  The cost is $63.584 million.  Also already scheduled is a project to stabilize the island’s wharf at a cost of $40.2 million.

So now we are ready to start repairing those old cells, the reason we started this whole nonsense.  Well, no.  The old Alcatraz cells were 5’ by 9’, totaling 45 square feet in total.  While there is no set national minimum cell size, numerous court challenges on the space necessary to avoid “cruel and unusual punishment” have forced the Department of Justice to set detention standards for segregation call for at least 70 square feet total, with 35 square feet unencumbered by bunks or plumbing. 

Wait, wait: there’s even more!  In the federal prison system, prison cells do not all have to be ADA-compliant in the sense that every single cell must meet full accessibility specs; instead, federal prisons must make their institutions accessible as required by the Rehabilitation Act, the Architectural Barriers Act, applicable federal accessibility standards, and Bureau of Prisons policy.  The BOP’s disability policy says federal institutions “should be accessible” to that extent, and the…. Well…let’s just say that bringing Alcatraz up to code is going to reflect some significant and expensive design modifications.  While the cells don’t have to meet ADA compliance, the facilities for the modern coed guards do have to meet modern standards. 

At this point, you should realize that none of the existing cells on Alcatraz meet any of these standards and the entire cell blocks would have to be rebuilt.  And there are similar concerns about the kitchens, shower areas, and medical services meeting modern codes.  By far the simplest solution would be to bulldoze down the site—ignoring that it is on the National Register for Historic Sites—and build a new prison.  While we are somehow turning the small cells into large cells, we should go ahead and add in the HVAC, fire suppression, electronic controls, medical space, kitchens, staff areas, backup power, and marine security.  I’ll skip all the back of the envelope figuring and just give you the bottom line.  This is going to cost about $1.2 billion.

Which raises the rather obvious question:  If you are going to have to build a new prison, why not build it someplace where the cost will be much cheaper? 

If the goal is to make Alcatraz hold about 300 inmates again the honest number is not the White House’s $152 million first-year ask, but something more like a total rebuild cost of roughly $1.2 billion.  In short, a little over a billion dollars buys you a boutique rock in the bay for 300 prisoners, which is an impressively inefficient way to do corrections.

By contrast, a brand-new 4,000-bed prison in the middle of nowhere Nevada would almost certainly be cheaper per inmate and might well cost about the same in total.  One policy estimate based on recent prison construction put a 4,000-bed facility at about $500 million.  So, the dark joke here is that for roughly the kind of money it could take to resurrect Alcatraz for 300 people, you could build two ordinary 4,000-bed mainland prisons with roads, utilities, and parking.  We would also avoid about two decades of battles in California court followed by endless appeal in the 9th Circus.  (But who in their right mind would want to do that???)

Clearly, Alcatraz will never again be a federal penitentiary.  But, you should know that officials from both the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons have recently toured the island and are actively planning to proceed.

Couldn’t we just lock them up there now and save a lot of taxpayers money?

Ghost Ship, Meet the Actual Ghost Spreadsheet

In Ghost Ship (2002), a salvage crew in the Bering Sea is lured toward a long-lost ocean liner and the movie wastes no time telling you exactly what kind of story it wants to be.  Not a story about insurance, maritime liens, beneficial ownership, sanctions databases, or the exact legal meaning of “abandoned.”  No, this is a story about a creepy ship, a mysterious past, a plucky salvage crew with bad luck, and the wonderfully cinematic notion that if a haunted liner is floating around in international waters, whoever gets there first can pretty much plant a boot on the deck and say, with professional enthusiasm, “Gentlemen, we have hit the jackpot.” The plot follows that marine salvage crew as it discovers an ocean liner lost since 1962, and the whole thing is wrapped in the sort of damp, rusty, supernatural nonsense that horror movies allegedly do well. 

The legal fantasy underneath it is even better.  Ghost Ship leans into the old movie rule of salvage, which can be summarized as: “find it, tow it, keep it.” Actual admiralty law, alas, is a killjoy.  The popular belief that a salvor becomes the owner is erroneous; ordinarily the owner can reclaim the property by paying salvage money.  And under the more limited law of finds, a would-be taker must prove intentional abandonment, possession, and intent to reduce the property to ownership.  In other words, real salvage law is less “Yo-ho-ho,” and more “Please hold while counsel reviews the paperwork.”

Which brings us to the Arctic Metagaz, a vessel that sounds like the title of a low-budget streaming thriller but is, in fact, a very real LNG tanker having a very bad year.  Unlike Ghost Ship’s glamorous phantom liner, the Arctic Metagaz is a working gas carrier, IMO 9243148, built in 2003, now about 23 years old, roughly 909 feet long, about 43.4 meters wide, and sailing under the Russian flag.  In plain English, it is less “ghostly palace of the damned” and more “very large refrigerated industrial problem with geopolitical implications.”  Public ship databases also show it currently under numerous heavy sanctions imposed by the U.S., the UK, and the EU, which is generally not the sort of accessory that improves resale value. 

The ship’s biography reads like a witness trying very hard not to be recognized in a lineup.  The vessel’s former names include Berge Everett, BW Suez Everett, BW GDF Suez Everett, BW Everett, Metagas Everest, Everest Energy, and then, eventually, Arctic Metagaz.  Some of those earlier names plainly belong to a normal commercial life before sanctions politics swallowed the plot.  Others, especially the recent shuffle among Metagas Everest, Everest Energy, and Arctic Metagaz, have all the breezy innocence of a man wearing a fake mustache and insisting he has never, in fact, heard of the bank that was robbed yesterday. 

The ownership and management picture is as murky as you would expect from a ship floating around the Mediterranean with sanctions attached to it.  Reuters reported in October 2025, that the registered owner was Lathyrus Shipping and the commercial manager was Ocean Speedstar Solutions, both with registered addresses in Mumbai which appear to be mail drops for paper corporations.  Other reporting around the March 2026 casualty identified the vessel’s Russia-based manager as LLC SMP Techmanagement.  The best way to describe this without requiring a chart the size of a dining-room table is that the paper trail points to Mumbai paper companies, while operational responsibility appears to run through Russia.  Everyone involved looks less like an old-fashioned shipowner in a commodore’s cap and more like a stack of filing cabinets speaking in accents. 

This aging vessel is a perfect example of the Russian “shadow fleet”: aging ships with poor maintenance and a horrible record of environmental issues   used to circumvent sanctions imposed after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Shadow fleet ships are engaged in illegal operations to circumvent sanctions, evade safety or environmental rules, avoid insurance costs, or engage in other illegal activity.

Then came the part where reality outdid Hollywood for melodrama, while somehow becoming even less cinematic.  On March 3, 2026, Reuters reported that the Arctic Metagaz caught fire in the Mediterranean—probably (but unconfirmed) because Ukraine attacked it with a drone—and that its crew was later found safe in a lifeboat within Libya’s search-and-rescue region.  There was early confusion, including a Libyan advisory later cited by Reuters as saying the ship had sunk, but later reporting made clear that the vessel was, in fact, still afloat, damaged and drifting unmanned.  Even the ship’s obituary had to be retracted.  It is hard to look ominous and legendary when the first question is not “What ancient evil lives aboard?” but “Wait, is it sunk, or not sunk?”

By March 18, Reuters reported that the damaged tanker had entered Libyan search-and-rescue waters, and by March 20 Italian officials were warning that the vessel posed an “imminent and serious risk” of ecological disaster, estimating that it still carried 450 metric tons of heavy oil, 250 tons of diesel, and an uncertain amount of LNG, with only two of its tanks thought intact.  This is the moment where any lingering fantasy of jaunty freelance salvors racing out in a tug to claim a prize should yield to the sober realization that a drifting LNG tanker is not treasure.  It is a very large chemistry exam in bad weather. 

Libya, understandably, did not treat the matter as a charming adventure and Libya’s coast guard began towing the vessel away from its shores, while the country’s National Oil Corporation worked with Russian and Maltese authorities to prevent a maritime and environmental mess.  Then, because the sea enjoys plot twists of its own, the towing operation failed.  Reuters and AP both reported that the ship broke loose in bad weather near the limits of Malta’s search-and-rescue zone on April 2.  Libyan authorities warned other vessels to keep at least 10 nautical miles away and to report any sign of leaks or smoke.  This is not “open for salvage.” This is “please back away slowly from the giant floating danger can.” 

According to the latest reliable reporting, the Arctic Metagaz is best described as still adrift in the central Mediterranean after the failed tow, still  somewhere in the unhappy neighborhood of Libyan waters and the edge of Malta’s search-and-rescue zone.  So, anyone claiming to know the ship’s exact present location from a cheerful little consumer map is either overselling the map, overselling himself, or both.  The honest answer is that the latest hard reporting places it out there, loose again, with official authorities trying to keep a dangerous situation from getting worse.

Now let us return to the movie myth.  Is the Arctic Metagaz available to the first rugged opportunist with a towline, a beard, and a dream?  Nope.  Very much nope.  Under ordinary salvage law, the salvor does not get title merely by rescuing a vessel.  He gets, at most, a claim to a salvage award or lien, while ownership remains with the owner, unless very specific legal standards for abandonment are met, and it would probably take a decade to establish who really owns the Arctic Metagaz.  “No crew aboard” is not the same thing as “free on Craigslist.”  

That, really, is why the Arctic Metagaz fascinates.  It is Ghost Ship stripped of romance and left under harsh fluorescent light.  It has the eerie, drifting hull, the vanished crew, the uncertain cargo, the maritime rumors, the dramatic photographs, and the sense that something lawless is happening just beyond the horizon.  But instead of supernatural gold and demonic ferrymen, the real supporting cast consists of sanctions officials, Libyan maritime authorities, insurance questions, Mumbai registration addresses, Russia-linked management, tracking data, and a lingering environmental threat.  It is the same human appetite for mystery, only fed through spreadsheets, acronyms, and emergency advisories. 

So the final lesson is almost disappointingly adult.  Movies taught us, “find it, tow it, keep it.”  The Arctic Metagaz teaches a harsher and much less marketable rule: find it, document it, sanction it, argue over it, tow it badly, lose the tow, warn shipping traffic, and call more lawyers.  That version will never sell as many tickets, but it has the distinct advantage of being how the world actually works.  The ghost ship of the movies offers a cursed treasure.  The ghost spreadsheet of the real Mediterranean offers a 23-year-old LNG tanker, a maze of names, and a reminder that the sea may be romantic, but maritime law absolutely is not.