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Alex(ander) Zelkin was well-known for his Sn3 layout. He was born in France shortly before WWII. Shortly after WWII, his father bought him a Jouet de Paris train set (that company was the French equivalent of A.C. Gilbert). He moved around quite a bit in the 1960s, but eventually settled in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1966. Professionally, he was a folk singer, specializing in Russian and French folk songs. He became active in model railroading in 1974, building several HO-scale layouts. In 1984 he discovered Sn3 and that's when he started this well-known Degulbeef & Cradding layout. In 1991 he returned back to his native France, so Degulbeef & Cradding "version 1" was no more, but in 1998 he built "version 2".

This is the version most of us are familiar with, and the one about which he actually wrote and published a book. The layout is fictitious, but set in the 1920s in the Pacific Northwest. It was an around-the-room layout measuring 12'6" x 19'. While he announced that he stopped working on the layout in 2015, he debated a long time before taking it down, and he even started a new layout shortly before his passing in late 2022.

The photo, above, of his layout is a saw mill scene with the room's lights turned off. The mill had lots of details in it, which Alex stated that some of them took 11 years to make and add; essentially, he kept making and adding details to this model over a long period of time.

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