Last Saturday was the 2026 Toyplosion, billed as Germany’s and Europe’s biggest retro toy convention, now in its fourth year. As in previous years, the 2026 Toyplosion took place at the Europahalle in the Ruhrgebiet city of Castrop-Rauxel.
For me, this was the third Toyplosion. I missed the first one, because both my parents were sick at the time, but I attended the 2024 and 2025 editions. You can see my comments about the previous Toyplosions here.
Toyplosion is a great con and a must for toy collectors, so of course I was going to attend this year as well. And indeed, I bought my tickets as soon as they went on sale – almost a year ago to the day.
He-Man goes Ruhrpott – again.
Castrop-Rauxel is 230 kilometers away, which is a drive of about two hours and fifteen minutes under ideal traffic conditions. Going there and back in a day is perfect doable and indeed, that’s what I did in 2024. However, it is a lot of driving and exhausting. Besides, the Ruhrgebiet also has a ton of interesting museums and industrial heritage sites to offer that I would like to visit. Hence also the title of “The He-Man and Transformers Industrial Heritage Tour”. Why Transformers? Well, you just have to wait and see.
So I booked a hotel for the night and would do some sightseeing on Sunday before embarking on the drive back home.
A Few Words on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the September 11 Attacks and Remembrance in General
On Friday, I went to bed early, since I had a long day ahead of me. The fact that it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks and as a result, social media was pretty much unusable, helped to make this an easy decision.
Now I decided sometime in late September or early October 2001 that I had heard and seen all I ever wanted to see about the September 11 attacks and so I flat out refused to watch memorials, anniversaries, documentaries, etc… I also never ever use the term “9/11”, a) because 9.11. is November 9 in Germany and much of Europe and that day already has more than enough history attached to it, and b) because German journalist Tina Mendelsohn would always go on about “9/11” (said in English), when she was hosting the cultural TV program Kulturzeit, of which I was an avid watcher. Tiny Mendelsohn started hosting Kulturzeit in September 2001, so in retrospect her obsession with the September 11 attacks is kind of understandable, but at the time I found it super-annoying.
Of course, you cannot ignore the September 11 attacks completely, because you inevitably see news reports and social media posts around the anniversary. But it seemed to me that there was less and more muted coverage in recent years. Once upon a time, the reading of the names of the dead would be broadcast in full on German TV, but in recent years we only saw a few brief clips on the news. I have issues with this form of remembrance anyway, because even in the brief clips on the news, so many non-English names are blatantly mispronounced, which just seems incredibly disrespectful towards the victims and their families. The most notable one, at least to me, is a German businessman named Heinrich Ackermann who was a passenger on one of the planes which crashed into the World Trade Center. Since the names are read in alphabetical order, his name is the second or third on the list and whoever reads his name, usually some US politician, inevitably gets it wrong. And he’s not the only one either. This year, for some reason, they broadcast later during the reading of the names, where the names of several people of Indian origin were mispronounced. Honestly, would it be so difficult to ask the families of the dead for a pronounciation guide?
I did expect an uptick in coverage this year, because it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, but there was a lot more coverage than I expected to the point that some social media sites were pretty much wall to wall September 11 posts. It’s also notable that a lot of the really horrible footage – people jumping or falling, body parts on the ground – that hasn’t been shown since 2001, suddenly resurfaced and that awful things that were new – at least to me – like the “gore floor”, where one of the planes ploughed directly into the so-called Sky Lobby of one of the towers, where about two hundred people were waiting for the elevators, also suddenly resurfaced. I could have happily lived without ever hearing about the “gore floor” BTW. Part of that may have been in response to young people born after 2000 questioning some of the events and whether people really saw footage of people falling or jumping live on TV. Or it may be to stroke up patriotic feelings, because the US is currently engaged in a war in the Middle East again and it’s not going well.
But it’s also possible that we have reached the time of peak remembrance where remembrance of a historical event is inescapable. Normally, peak remembrance happens around forty years later, when many people who remember the event are still around and alive, but enough time has passed that they’re willing to look back. The clearest example is a remembrance of the anniversary of the end of World War II. For fortieth anniversary in 1985, remembrance of the end of World War II was everywhere. For several days, you couldn’t switch on the TV or open a newspaper without seeing World War II remembrance stuff. To me, who was twelve at the time, this was extremely irritating. Of course, remembering the end of World War II is important, but did it have to be on every single TV channel? Did they really have to cancel all of other programming for that? My parents, who were small children during World War II, were also irritated by the sheer amount of coverage. My Dad, who avidly watched WWII documentary and old news reels, said at the time that there certainly wasn’t that much coverage for the thirtieth or twentieth anniversaries and how much would there be for the fiftieth anniversary in ten year’s time? However, when 1995 rolled aro0und, there was a lot of coverage, but it was not as overwhelming as it had been ten years before. Of course, the fact that we now had more than three TV channels helped, too. The sixtieth, seventieth, seventy-fifth and eightieth anniversaries were even more muted, though the seventy-fifth anniversary also coincided with the covid pandemic. And yes, Russia still has a military parade on May 8th, but we all know that’s mainly propaganda for the here and now. Nowadays, it’s quite possible to look at a calendar on May 8th and realise that you completely forgot it was the anniversary of the end of WWII.
Another, more local example, is a remembrance of the Bremen Soviet Republic, an experiment in direct democracy that ended in bullets, blood and tears in February 1919. Even 117 years later, there still is a memorial ceremony every year at Walle Cemetery, where the 28 fallen defenders of the Bremen Soviet Republic as well as 24 soldiers who died while overthrowing the Bremen Soviet Republic are buried about five hundred meters away from each other. I always attend the memorial ceremony, because my Great-Uncle Nick was one of the defenders of the Bremen Soviet Republic, though he wasn’t killed, but hopped on the next steamer to America to escape arrest, where he lived happily every after in Miami until he died in the early 1980s. These days, the memorial ceremony is attended by various labour unions, leftist groups and splinter parties, maybe a hundred people altogether. I’m the only one who actually has a family connection to someone who was involved.
I’ve been told that the memorial ceremony used to be a lot bigger in the 1950s and 1960s and attracted thousands of people. In 1972, the leftist groups and labour unions even collected enough to money for a new monument to replace the previous monument that had been destroyed by the Nazis. The fortieth anniversary of the suppression of the Bremen Soviet Republic was in 1959, i.e. there is the forty years peak remembrance period again.
BTW, the 24 dead soldiers who are buried some five hundred meters away from the 28 people they shot don’t get a memorial ceremony. No one ever visits their graves or remembers them.
But back to the trip…
Autobahn A1 and Some Car Comparisons
On Saturday morning, I got up at half past four, took a shower, got dressed and set off at half past five. It was still dark outside – sunrise was at seven minutes before seven, i.e. more than an hour away – and also quite foggy. “Oh, fog”, I thought, “I guess that means fall is finally coming.”
Once I got into the car and drove off, I realised that there wasn’t just a bit of fog outside. No, the fog was so dense that I had to reduce my speed, especially since getting to the Autobahn required taking Bundesstraße B322, a curvy tree-lined country road. Now I know the B322 very well, but it was not just foggy but also pitch dark, so I’d rather drive carefully than end up in a ditch or splattered against a tree.
Since the Mercedes was foully murdered – and yes, the car cannot be saved, sadly, since the repairs would cost more than the car is worth – I had to take the hybrid. Now the hybrid is a really nice car. It’s great for trips in the twenty to thirty kilometer range and its trunk is actually bigger than that of the Mercedes. However, on longer trips, the diesel engine of the Mercedes is or rather was more efficient. So I used the hybrid for every day errands and the Mercedes for longer trips. So the trip to Toyplosion would also be the first time I took the hybrid on a long road trip. I did take the hybrid to an appointment in Wunstorf near Hannover about 95 kilometers away as well as to an interpretation job at the Bremerhaven district court about 90 kilometers away. But Castrop-Rauxel is 230 kilometers away, i.e. more than twice the trip to Wunstorf or Bremerhaven.
I should probably say a few words about the hybrid: It’s a Mitsubishi Outlander plug-in hybrid. The battery is theoretically good for seventy kilometers, but in practice it’s more like fifty or sixty kilometers. I recharge the hybrid at home in my own garage, using my own power (either solar or co-generation), so trips within the battery range are basically free. For trips beyond the battery range, there is a regular combustion engine that charges the battery and powers the car. Every three months, I have to top up the gas tank, because otherwise the gas will go bad. When the three month limit is reached, there’s a message on the dashboard and the car just refuses to drive electrically until I buy at least fifteen liters of gasoline. Until recently, I never used fifteen liters of gasoline in three months, but had to drive around with the combustion engine for several days until I had burned the required fifteen liters of fuel.
However, with the Mercedes gone, I have to take the hybrid on trips beyond the battery range, so the fuel tank empties a lot faster. I actually did refuel the hybrid on Friday, so the tank would be full for the trip and I wouldn’t be forced to go hunting for a gas station in unfamiliar territory, especially not given the current gas prices and the annoying twelve o’clock rule, which stipulates that gas stations may only raise their prices once a day at twelve o’clock, but lower them as often as they want. It’s a stupid rule that actually led to higher prices than before, but since our government is not willing to get rid of it, this means that you have to refuel your car around ten or eleven in the morning for the best prices.
On Saturday morning, I drove onto Autobahn A1 at Groß Mackenstedt, headed south. Normally, I would have switched into charge mode on the Autobahn, because Autobahn driving drains the battery, so I just switch to the combustion engine and recharge.
This time, however, I kept the car in electrical mode, because I wanted to see how long the battery lasted. I know that on Autobahn A28 the battery lasts until Tweelbäke on the eastern edge of Oldenburg – that’s roughly 45 kilometers. However, I had never tried it on Autobahn A1. The answer BTW is that the battery lasted until junction Ahlhorner Heide, before the combustion engine came on. That’s roughly 45 kilometers. Of course, Autobahn driving does drain the battery, so you get fifty or sixty kilometers on country roads.
Once I reached junction Ahlhorner Heide, not only did the engine come on, but the foggy blackness outside gradually turned into foggy grayness. On the Autobahn, the fog was no longer quite so dense and there wasn’t a lot of traffic either at this early hour, so I could go a bit faster. I also switched the car to charge mode and when the battery was sufficiently recharged, I switched back to electrical mode for another twenty to thirty kilometers or so. I find that this is a most efficient way to drive the hybrid on longer trips.
Another issue with the hybrid that I hadn’t encountered before was the radio. Now I always have the car radio set to Radio Bremen 1, except when I’m about to go out of range and have to switch to a different channel. With the Mercedes, I always knew roughly when I was about to get out of range and had to switch channels. In northbound direction, the range is roughly up to Hamburg-Harburg, in southbound direction to Osnabrück, in eastbound direction shortly before Hannover and in westbound direction to Leer. The range depends on the weather to some degree, but it’s usually around one hundred kilometers
As explained here, I need music to stay awake and alert while driving. Too much talking on the radio is dangerous, because it makes me drift off and get tired. The wrong kind of music, meanwhile, can be actively irritating. Luckily, I know which stations to switch to, when I’m about to get out of range of Radio Bremen 1, unless I’m way into terra incognita like during my trips to Heidelberg and Berlin, where I wasn’t familiar with the radio stations at all. But in the north western part of Germany, I usually switch to NDR 1, which is kind of hilarious to me, because when I was a teenager, NDR 1 used to be a terrible old people station that only played Schlager and German folk music. Nowadays, they play 1980s music, oldies and some general pop music rather than Schlager and German folk music. If you’re in Hamburg, Hamburg 2, a 1980s focussed station, is good as well. Though it’s a private radion station and I usually stick to the public stations while driving, because they have better and more detailed traffic reports. When I’m visiting my pal Michael in Hildesheim, I sometimes also switch to Radio Brocken, another 1980s focussed private radio station. And when I’m headed southwards, I switch to WDR 4, which also offers a mix of oldies and 1980s music, cause that’s what works best for me.
But while I know the range of the car radio of the Mercedes, it turns out that the range of car radio of the hybrid is smaller – sixty to seventy kilometers compared to a hundred for the Mercedes. So I had to switch channels earlier.
However, when trying to switch channels on the car radio of the hybrid, I ran into another unexpected issue. For while the radio of the Mercedes gives the name of the station, the radio of the hybrid mostly just lists frequencies. And while I know the frequence of Radio Bremen 1, I don’t know the frequency of WDR 4 at all. So I either had to scroll through all the stations until I find the right one or look up the frequency. Doing this, while going about 120 to 130 kilometers per hour in the fog is dangerous, so I decided to stop at the next suitable parking lot or service station to change the frequency.
Service Station Dammer Berge
At this point, I was about five kilometers from service station Dammer Berge with its iconic bridge restaurant, so that was the perfect place to stop and change the frequency. For more about service station Dammer Berge, see this post.
By this point, I had driven about an hour and it was maybe fifteen minutes before sunrise, but it was still gloomy and foggy outside. In fact, the fog was so dense that when I passed the exit sign for service station Dammer Berge, I couldn’t see either the restaurant or the gas station. Now there is a bend in Autobahn just before the exit, so you can only see the bridge restaurant once you round that bend. However, when I drove onto service station Dammer Berge, I could see the lights of the gas station shining through the fog, but I still couldn’t see the bridge restaurant, even though it’s always brightly lit, even in the middle of the night. It was only when I had passed the gas station that I finally saw the lights of the bridge restaurant shining through the fog.
I did not go into restaurant, because I neither needed to use the toilet nor was I in the mood for overpriced soapy coffee and gloopy cake. However, I took some photos of the bridge restaurant in the fog.
Service station Dammer Berge in the fog. Note that this photo was taken approx. 50 meters from the bridge restaurant and about fifteen minutes before sunrise, so you can see how dense the fog was that morning.
The southbound entrance of the Dammer Berge bridge restaurant in the fog. Note the somewhat tarnished logo of Serways, the exploitative jerks who operate pretty much all German Autobahn service stations and completely ruined them.
Service station Dammer Berge also has an Autobahn church. I have written about the phenomenon of Autobahn churches here and here. I like churches in general and the idea of Autobahn churches in particular, so I have visited eight Autobahn churches so far and eventually hope to visit all 44 in Germany. I should probably do a post with photos of all the Autobahn churches I visited so far.
Autobahn chapel Dammer Berge is a Brutalist design built in 1970 and was the first ecumenic Autobahn church in Germany – the previous ones were either Lutheran or Catholic, though it doesn’t really matter, because everybody is welcome in an Autobahn church. Even Muslims have been known to use these roadside chapels as a quiet space for prayer.
Autobahn chapel Dammer Berge in the fog
In spite of the early hour, Autobahn chapel Dammer Berge was already open. Some Autobahn churches are open twenty-four hours, seven days a week, but many of them are only open during daytime, because vandalism and theft are sadly concerns.
The interior of Autobahn chapel Dammer Berge
I did get to visit another Autobahn church on this trip, Rhynern on Autobahn A2, but that’s a story for another post.
Across the Teutoburg Forest and Into the Münsterland
All in all, I spent maybe ten minutes wandering around service station Dammer Berge, drinking water and eating chocolate and changing the frequency on my car radio. Though the lower range of the hybrid’s car radio meant that I had to change to NDR 1 first, because I wasn’t yet in range for WDR 4, even though I was only about twenty-five kilometers from the border to Northrhine-Westfalia, where WDR is the local radio and TV station. Though I did look up the frequency for WDR 4, so I wouldn’t have to stop again.
About ten minutes after leaving service station Dammer Berge, I passed Osnabrück and then crossed the Teutoburg Forest. Now the Teutoburg Forest is infamously gloomy, as Publius Quinctilius Varus infamously found out in 9 AD. Though the actual battle took place in Kalkriese north of Osnabrück. And since it was foggy anyway, the Teutoburg Forest was extra gloomy and fog-shrouded that day.
After crossing the Teutoburg Forest, the land gets flat again, as you drive through the Münsterland and pass Münster in a wide arc. The Münsterland is thinly populated, the exits here are far apart and there’s not a lot to see.
By now, it was past seven AM, I had been up for almost three hours and I was getting hungry. It was time for breakfast. If I wasn’t familiar with the route, I would have pulled into a roadside parking lot at this point and looked for a bakery nearby. However, by now I am pretty familiar with Autobahn A1 between Hamburg and the Ruhrgebiet and had a breakfast destination in mind.
So I drove onwards. After the void that is the Münsterland, you reach the exit Hamm, which marks the northern edge of the Ruhrgebiet. There even is a brown roadside sign announcing the “Metropolitan Region Rhine Ruhr”. However, Hamm is just another Autobahn exit and the real start of the Ruhrgebiet and its confusing tangle of Autobahnen all named A Fortysomething is intersection Kamener Kreuz, where Autobahn A1 and Autobahn A2 intersect.
Breakfast at Kamener Kreuz
In order to get to Castrop-Rauxel, I would have to change onto Autobahn A2 at Kamener Kreuz. However, I wanted to have breakfast first, so I stayed on Autobahn A1 until the next exit, Kamen-Zentrum. Cause at exit Kamen-Zentrum, there is a large business park directly next to the Autobahn. Among other things, this business park also contains a branch of Bakery Grobe, a Dortmund based chain with branches all over the Eastern Ruhrgebiet. I discovered the Grobe bakery café two years ago on my way home from Los Amigos in Neuss. Ever since then, it has become a regular pit stop, whenever I find myself at Kamener Kreuz.
Even though it was a quarter to eight AM on a Saturday morning, Bakery Grobe was not overly busy. I guess a lot of the folks who just pop into the bakery to get fresh rolls or bread for their weekend breakfast were still asleep. And since the summer holidays have ended in all German states by now, there wasn’t that much traffic on the Autobahn. So I didn’t have to wait long to place my order.
I ordered a Dortmund market omelette, which is an omelette with cheese and tomatoes, though it seems they were out of cheese this time around. Though it was still tasty and the protein gave me a much-needed boost.
Adam, Teela and Cringer approve.
Breakfast of Champions of Grayskull
I settled down at a quiet table in a corner of the café away from the counter. However, my quiet corner did not stay quiet for long, because no sooner had I settled down did a British-German family (based on their car licence plate and languages spoken) with a boisterous toddler and a surprisingly quiet dog in tow sit down at the neighbouring table. I decided to take the photo with my He-Man figures anyway, because I’m beyond caring what random strangers think of me. Besides, the family was too busy with their toddler to pay attention to me and my action figures.
Before heading onwards, I made one more stop. Because the business park at Kamener Kreuz also houses a branch of Smyths Toys, the Irish chain that took over the European Toy R Us stores after Toys R Us went bankrupt. And that Smyths branch was just about to open by the time I finished breakfast. Of course, I was headed to a con with plenty of toys on offer, but since there was a Smyths only a few meters away, I might as well pop in and check if there was anything of interest. I got lucky, too, because on the clearance shelves, I found a figure of Quintus Prime, a Cthulhu-esque Transformer, who is also one of the thirteen founders of Cybertron. I have no idea why Smyths even carried this figure, since their selection of Transformers isn’t normally that great – just the child-focussed toylines and the most mainstream of characters, not deep cut characters like Quintus Prime. However, he (I had to check the gender, since it’s not always obvious with Transformers) was cheap and I liked the way he looked, so I bought him to join my growing Transformers collection.
Autobahn A2 and two A Fortysomethings
By the time I left Smyths, it was just past nine AM. The con was set to open in about an hour and I still had half an hour or so to drive, so I programmed my GPS Else (yes, I know I also called the GPS of the Mercedes “Else”, so I guess this is Else 2.0) for Europa Halle in Castrop-Rauxel and set off again.
I assumed Else would direct me back to Autobahn A1, but instead she directed me through the town of Kamen to Autobahn A2. I followed Autobahn A2 past Lünen and the northern edge of Dortmund. At junction Dortmund-Northwest, I changed onto Autobahn A45. Autobahn A45 is the infamous Autobahn with the forty crumbling viaducts that have to be replaced all at once, so I tend to avoid it. However, the forty crumbling viaducts are far to the south in the Sauerland and I never got even close to them, since I left Autobahn A45 at the very next exit, intersection Castrop-Rauxel East and changed onto Autobahn A42, which I left at again exit Castrop-Rauxel a few kilometers later.
By now, it was maybe a quarter to ten. The con venue, the Europahalle at Forum Castrop-Rauxel, is very close to the Autobahn, so I arrived just in time. I made my way to the entrance to the underground parking garage. Meanwhile, the queue was already so long that it extended down the ramp leading up to Forum Castrop-Rauxel and was snaking around the block and past the entrance to the parking garage. I actually had to honk, so people would let me pass, cause I was driving in electric mode again at this point, so the car is silent.
As described here, the underground parking garage is dark and gloomy. And since it’s more than fifty years old, the parking spaces are also narrow and small, made for a very different type of car. And the hybrid is a very long car. I finally found a parking place that I could safely manoeuver into. Based on my experience last year, I did not bother looking for the ticket machine, since parking was free for congoers. Instead, I found the nearest staircase leading up to the main deck of Forum Castrop-Rauxel.
This is as good a time as any to talk about the venue, which is an interesting example of post-WWII architecture. Forum Castrop-Rauxel is an ensemble of several public buildings: Castrop-Rauxel city hall, a theatre, a restaurant and two events venues – the Europa Hall, originally designed as a venue for sports events, and the Stadthalle (literally city hall, but in Germany the term refers to a public events venue). In the first two years, Toyplosion only occupied the Europa Hall, but by now they also added the Stadthalle and the restaurant to offer more space for vendors and visitors. The Forum Castrop-Rauxel complex was designed by the famous Danish architect Arne Jacobsen and his partner Otto Weitling. Modernist and brutalist architecture can be hard to like, but Forum Castrop-Rauxel is a genuinely interesting and good complex of buildings, as this aerial view shows. The only drawback is that it is a bit isolated.
For Castrop-Rauxel is actually two separate towns named Castrop and Rauxel combined into one city in 1926. Forum Castrop-Rauxel is located midway between Castrop and Rauxel and was an attempt to create a new city center for the town. Like so many lofty architectural plans of the 1960s and 1970s, it didn’t quite work out. Instead of a new city center, you still have two cities with separate city centers and a postwar complex midway between the two, not really close to anything else except the Autobahn.
This side of Forum Castrop-Rauxel contains Castrop-Rauxel’s townhall. The glass-enclosed part with the swooping roof is the chamber of the Castrop-Rauxel city council. The hedge hides one of the staircases that lead down to the parking garage.
A look at Castrop-Rauxel Stadthalle with its swooping roof shaped like a ski jump. Behind the fences, there is an outdoor food court/beer garden for con goers. The area is fenced off to prevent people from sneaking in.
In addition to the long main queue, there was a second shorter queue for people like me who had already bought their tickets online, so I joined that queue and waited to be let into the con.
The long queue for the ticket booth can be seen behind the row of parked cars. I would prefer if there were no parked cars on the deck, but it is allowed.
The shorter queue for people who already had tickets.
Since I already had a ticket, I didn’t have to wait very long to be let in. I got my armband and went browsing the offerings. But that is a story for another post.
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