Any suggestions?

I was round at a friend's house today and spotted this beautiful and very unusual item on top of the piano!

Amazing eh? Actually there is a whole train - the locomotive, a 'Wagon-Lits' coach, a 'hospital coach' with stretcher and a working rotary snowplough (watch your fingers!) . It is '0' Gauge tinplate, as is obvious I guess from the 1:48 on the cab side.

I said I'd try and identify it for them. My own guess is that it's Bing from the early 1920's. The locomotive (obvious from the conical smokebox door not visible here) is modelled on a Bavarian 'Pacific' and it has the letters 'GBN Patent' which I think was the first trade mark of 'Gerbruuders Bing'. That hospital coach kind of dates it to shortly after the First World War for me.

It's a very fine model - the clockwork mechanism inside is finished like a Swiss clock and would power a battleship and is still immaculate. This is really the 'Paleolithic' of railway/railroad modelling eh? When people first realised that trains were worth modelling!