... pretty obvious, isn''t it? Because you end up with a Request model and hence @request instance variables - and there you go: marvellous clash with the controller environment that is established in instance variables ... such as @request. After renaming my model to ''Inquiry'' everything just worked fine. Stupid as I am, that insight took me some time to figure out, so I thought I could post a warning here. So that would mean that these are bad model/table names: - Request/requests - Param/params - Cookie/cookies - Response/responses - Session/sessions (watch out you conference management coders ;-) - Header/headers I couldn''t find any hints about reserved model names in the Rails book, but only now found this wiki page: http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/ReservedWords Hope that helps others from struggling - and please correct if I am wrong Thanks Thomas