It is a little known fact that the famous Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona was a keen railway modeller.

Many famous people are railway modellers. Rod Stewart and Pete Waterman have huge, room filling layouts.

Maradona followed a different path and he became incredibly interested in micro shunting layouts.

He was so passionate about achieving smooth shunting operations he developed his own uncoupling system.

His ESDL (Eficiente Sistema de Desacoplamiento de Locomotoras) proved to be very reliable and simple to use.

It has become popular among micro layout enthusiasts and is widely used around the world.

Of course micro layout fans never call it by the long, official name.

They just call it ‘The Hand of God’.

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Image by Cadaverexquisito and used under a Creative Commons License.

This blog was published on 1st April 2022, April Fool’s Day, a day when people in many European countries play practical jokes and spread hoaxes. To the best of my knowledge Diego Maradona wasn’t a railway modeller and didn’t develop a uncoupling system. Would you have been fooled ?