Saturday, March 16, 2024

The 2-Yearly Update!

Over the past two years I've regularly 'seen' my Z scale Wassen layout but haven't done much to it. There are a few projects on the go, but there hasn't been all lot of progress for a very long time. Recently I have been tinkering with NZ trains again, but ...

Inexplicably, I decided to do something on Wassen today.

Other than some repairs needed to rewind several years of being stored vertically in a basement that isn't always dry, three obvious things need to be done. These are adding more buildings to the town, and doing something with.the two front corners, which have remained oddly unscenicked. 

I decided to start with the corner closest to the door of the room the layout is hiding in.  This is the 'upper' Wattinger bridge over the Reuss river, but in its current unfinished state, it is not a great first impression of the layout.

Above: some white plastic padding attached to the bridge before adding the sides. All of the 'visible'  track on the layout is flex track except for this corner (and of course the hidden spirals)

Some basic grass has been added in places under the bridge, and the its stone 'sides' are being added. These are the same photoshopped pictures printed out for the lower Wattinger bridge about seven years ago! Ballast is about to be glued down between the Rokuhan plastic track roadbeds.

Next it was time for tunnel portals. I'm almost out of the old dark grey Ratio roof slate sheets that were used for the other stone portals, but as this is a relatively self-contained little scene, I decided to use some cardboard cobblestone street sheets that I bought for my
N scale Brusio viaduct (another barely started project!)

And compared to the real location in the superb VGB Gotthard book:

Some trees, foliage and Woodland Scenics tallus rocks in the river will have the corner looking better than it did yesterday. 

I noted in the previous post (two years ago) about the upcoming Marklin Re 6/6. Two years later there is still no sign of these!

Friday, July 22, 2022

The second coming.

It's been quite some time since I've haunted these pages. More than two years in fact.

The reason was that our house had a bit of a refurbishment last year, and all delayed because of the pandemic, so the layout was put down in a back corner of the basement and covered in plastic.

All the rolling stock and modelling materials were boxed away, and there everything has hibernated for a while. 

I suppose I should have unearthed this all six months ago, but haven't really been in the mood. My little modelling workstation and chair are still stored at the other end of town, but I found most of the goodies, except many of the glues have dried up. 

Still there, wonder if sitting vertically for year has warped it...

What got me thinking about Z again were two things:
  1. Marklin has announced an Re 6/6!! Woohoo! This expensive little baby has a new coreless motor, so I hope it works with the 4/4s.
  2. The recent purchase of a Marklin 88270 Sdgmns (or thereabouts) intermodal well car with a Sarotti Schokolade (mmm, yummy) trailer and a truck as well. It's not often that modern-era Z stuff comes up on our local auction website TradeMe.

I've never seen one of these model well cars in the flesh, but have never liked them in pictures. They seem too 'tall' to me. I plan to make it look a little more like this:

I figure I'll ease back into modelling by starting on the trailer. The first thing I notice is that my eyes don't seem to work like they did a or two year ago, so I dug out my magnifying light. The second is that the modern era trailers have three axles, are longer and sit lower on their road wheels than the toylike Marklin offering. 

So I started by making a new box from styrene. I was going to build it with humped roof like in the prototype pic here, but decided that a flat one would have less chance of making a mess. I believe both are valid options for these Mainsped trailers. The bottomless box was painted an approximation of Mainsped brown on most of its faces.

The Marklin two axle trailer was chopped apart. It was split between the axles and reconstructed on a styrene floor. The truck gave up two of its (slightly thinner) rear wheels, and these were slipped between the existing trailer axles to give me three. 

The curtainsides were from a bunch of container images that I photoshopped and had printed off a few years ago. Fortunately I had included one of these.

The chassis was slipped inside the box and voila. Not too bad for a few hours work. Most of that was trying to paint the wheels. 

As a postscript, I chopped the Sarotti Schokolade box in half and put it onto of the now-lame truck (it has no rear wheels on the other side).  It might be put to work delivering chocolate to my Volg store in Wassen. Yes I will cover up that hideous contact glue beforehand. 



Thursday, June 18, 2020

Wassen Church Chapel

Actually I don't know what the species name is for this little domed dell outside the church door, but it is quite distinctive and had to be added.


Since the Coronawar lockdown ended in New Zealand a few weeks ago, I've only made rare visits to the train room, and none has been terribly productive. But I've contemplated this wee structure for some time and finally bit the bullet yesterday.

A a short piece of white plastic tube was earmarked for the job a year or two ago (and indeed it is probably visible perched forlornly on the landscape next to the church in various pictures that appear amongst the bloggage here).


To make some progress though, a roof was needed and it's a difficult shape. The original idea was to use the rounded top of an old BIC ballpoint pen, but that didn't eventuate, so yesterday I built up a rough knob of plastic stacked up on top of the tube. Starting with a thick plate cut into a rough circle and a few tubes stacked on top, with a square rod sticking out the top.

That didn't look terribly attractive, but was a start. The knob was stuck into a drill and lathed into shape over various visits with a little filler in between.

This turned out ok, so it was hurriedly painted up and glued into place thusly:


Yes this roof is round rather than having flat faces (which I suppose I could have filed into it) but this is close enough from a distance.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Another bloody grey sgnss - this time with a 45 footer - 3 - Finito.


I forgot to post these yesterday after brushing the dust off the big camera. Makes a change from using my 7 year old cellphone's blurry camera.


Monday, May 11, 2020

Another bloody grey sgnss - this time with a 45 footer - 2

Following on from last time,  You may remember that I planned to make one of these and got part way through the wagon chassis:



Since I can't find any Z scale 45 foot containers, some time back I photoshopped a few images together. Some of mine,  but most stolen off the web, fiddled with and perspective corrected. It was printed off on fairly good quality paper by a local print shop.


So, cutting out an ECS one:

And making up a box to go underneath:

While I scaled my clever print of plans perfectly for length in photoshop, they are about a mm thin in width across the wagon, so I painted any bits of my white box that might show out from underneath! I'm usually quite good at mixing paints to colour match things, but just couldn't get this purply shade right and kept coming back to various browns... Close enough. I also edged my cutouts in this paint - where my knife cuts exposed white paper edges:
You might also see above, while the brown paint was setting, that I applied a white .010 x .020 plastic strip along the bottom of the wagon chassis and some .020 x .020 x approx .020 cubes as twistlocks with previous wagons. I probably did a neater job on this one than any of my previous wagons.

Container cutouts here going onto the white box, and the two holes in the chassis bogie bolsters covered with paper:

As with the previous wagons, air tanks and some underframe detail was added, but this time an added detail was a brake cylinder and various actuating bits borrowed from one of those dump cars cut up for building previous container wagons:


Some grey paint and the wagon itself now nearing completion. Dark grey paint was used to edge the cutouts on the metal end platforms to make the deck look thinner for some reason. It has had end steps, data boards and tiedown hooks added from the red curtain topped wagon that donated the chassis. Yellow was daubed on twistlocks and the tiedown-protection-bars, and some thinned down brown was washed on as weathering:


Perhaps tomorrow the container - with glue setting in the background - will be affixed. I may need to trim down the height of one or two of my twistlocks to enable it to snuggle down over the side sills as planned.

You might also see in the model pic how much thinner the filed-down end platform side sills look compared to the taller centre section (black) of the full-height Marklin casting. This section should be hidden by the container by this time tomorrow.

Comparing this with the prototype pic, it's not strictly accurate, but gives a fair impression I reckon - and in my defence, there seem to be a million varietals of these 60 foot container flats. Most importantly, rather than riding tall like a lot of Marklin Z scale offerings, this looks more hunkered down over the bogies because of that plastic strip, which also adds visually to the thinning of the sill too. 

Saturday, May 9, 2020

Another bloody grey sgnss - this time with a 45 footer - 1

Well, what else can you do during the Covid-crisis?

Yet another Marklin bogie chassis has been freed up, so this time, for something slightly different, the target is something like:


 Stolen from the web but copied here in case that website goes away ...

As the ends of the wagon will be exposed this time (not covered by a full load of containers as most of mine are) I thought I'd "show off some frame member detail".  Firstly the wagon was thinned down with a file as per previous wagons. Then a small drill was deployed to make a lot of holes:

These random holes were then joined up using the drill and smoothed out with small files. I have a set of 5 'jewellers files' files in different shapes purchased about 20 years ago, and although I don't use them very often, they seem as good and sharp as the day they were born:

As with the last few wagons made from these chunky Marklin chassis, I will hang the sides of the container down over the wagon chassis sides a smidge, to make the container sit closer to the rails and make the wagon side sills seem thinner. Alas as the container will only hide the middle, so I took some metal off the top of the visible end platforms. Somehow the whole casting didn't snap or crack: 

Bare metal bits primed for an overnight setting:

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Another grey SGNSS container wagon - with a flat rack - 2

Now for Part 2 of this wagon story... 
Containers on and ready for detailing.

In the pic below you can see cubes of .020 x .020 styrene in place on one side as twistlocks, and more of them on the green mat below ready to be applied on the other side, affixed with superglue. Also you can see the long strips of .010 x .020 that will be applied along the bottom of the frame, below the twistlocks. This was glued on with a little PVA white glue to get things into place and then some superglue once things started to tack up in place.

Above the bogies, there is a short strip where the tiedown hooks will go.

Now that the sides are done and setting, a few bits were applied to the unders - air tanks and a box of sorts. 



 The tiedown hooks and data panels were liberated from the red curtaintop. They are imprisoned in a small plastic box to prevent them pinging off into the ether:

And carefully applied using the magnifying light - which I have to use a lot more these days since rocking across the big 5-0 hurdle.....

All painted up with grey and yellow dotted on:
The angled brass things (made from .008 brass wire) are the protectors that go across the tiedowns.

And a little touching up and weathering later (brown wash on the sills, brown drybrushed bogies, a little chalk on the container):

Three grey ones:

So that was two hours today and two hours yesterday for a new wagon... not a bad way to spend four hours of Covid-lockdown-time.