In 1970 ŽG Ljubljana, an entity of Yugoslav state railways (JŽ) and forerunner of todays Slovenian state railways (SŽ) ordered slighty less than 50 diesel hydraulic units at italian company FIAT ferroviaria. The type ordered was Aln 668-1800, a variant of well known and proved DMU Aln 668 in Italy. Theseunits came to Yugoslavia together in combiniation of powered unit (Aln 668) and trailer (Ln 882). They were to replace the old railbuses (Uerdinger VT85) and even more older 5 diesel units that remained after WW2 in nowadays Slovenia, the Aln 556. The new units were immideately used in local railroads in Slovenia (Ljubljana-Kamnik, Celje-Velenje, Maribor-Dravograd, Ljubljana-Novo Mesto, Jesenice-Nova Gorica itd) as well as on some other railroads in the vicinity. They could be seen in Spielfeld (Austria), Trieste (Italy) as well as in Zagreb and Pula (nowadays Croatia). After the breakup of Yugoslavia Slovenian state railways updated the majority of these DMU’s and 3 were sold to Bosnia and Herzegovina, to ŽRS. The modernized DMU’s have larger cabin for the engineers, which were later also climatized and a bit updated passenger cabin but the basis is still the same. The modernized DMU’s are now marked as SŽ class 813, series 100. There are some original DMU’s but soon they shall be replaced with upcoming Stadler Flirts 3.
The italian company ViTrains prepared model of Aln 668 in scale H0 years ago but on the contrary to company Rivarossi (Hornby), they started releasing the models from version Aln668-1000. So few years ago they released version of series -1800 which is identical to our model JŽ/SŽ 813. We talked on fair Hobby Model Expo 2019 in Novegro and they mentioned they would like to prepare also JŽ/SŽ version and they expressed readiness to prepare the trailer as well. On toyfair in Nürnberg 2020 they announced our version together with the correct trailer Ln 882. The models should arrive in spring 2022, the price for analog version is 315 EUR, for the version with digital sound decoder 415 EUR. We already accept the preorders for these models.