RABe 503: Feet Examination

Some ups and downs on the plastic passenger train...

As for a chassis, you may recall the race was on between a well-discounted but still expensive Rokuhan Shinkansen three car set (one powered centre car and two dummy end cars) and some incredibly cost effective Rokuhan 'Shorty' chassis. I could have gotten a whole trainset of these for half the price of the Shinkansen set.

First things first. A dremel was applied to the 'tabs' that intrude into the interior space where I'll want to put a chassis later. These tabs are visible in the upper car in the pic below. The lower protrusions that are the doors and the bogie supports were also thinned out from the inside to give more interior space for a chassis.

As for the chassis race, it seemed that the Rokuhan Shinkansen may have been quite the expensive dead end as far as becoming the underguts of my fancy passenger train goes...

It's really, really wide, much wider than expected, and the bogies are too close together, again, also unexpected!

Even putting in a fair bit of of surgery thinning this down (as reassembled in today's first pic with the Shorty above), it's still a smidge wider than my carriage can take, but will fit with the carriage ends removed and the sides prised apart a little. That might be bearable in terms of width, and I suppose the Shapeways top could be shortened if those inboard bogies bother me - and they might not be so obvious in a 6 car passenger train in Z scale where all the other cars have their bogies positioned more correctly. Perhaps I'll get away with it, but I may need to shorten it anyway if I want to use those couplers.

The dummy cars will basically be scrapped except for their bogies. I could use the pickups and lighting setups, but I'm not sure I can be bothered putting the effort in at this stage - perhaps that is something to be returned to in future. 

The Shorties were probably the more sensible option in hindsight, although their coupler shanks are a bit short to be useful here as can be seen below. Perhaps they can be extended, or body mounted. Or replaced with something simple. 

In the meantime, some paint has been spilt on the Shapeways tops to varying effect.

A Tale of Six Transwaggons

Following on from where we left off here, here, here, and here ...

...the last two items that were procured while over in Europe were another pair of Transwaggon branded Habbiins* bogie boxcars.

For some reason I tend to trawl eBay looking for bargains when I'm over in that part of the world figuring the shipping cost will be less. Sometimes the item seems a good price, but the shipping is exorbitant, but for these - from two different German sellers - it was the same reasonable cost anywhere worldwide so I shipped them down to the Antipodes.

Being in the correct scheme already, I didn't have to do much to do with them when they got here.

The roof and ends on the TW branded ones are a chocolate brown for some reason so I painted them a gull gray which I think looks good with the silver sides.

 I also picked out the tiedown hooks above the bogies and some handrails in yellow.

Plus a little gentle weathering on one (the other is completely unweathered - gasp! Not often you see that on one of my projects...

Six of these is enough for a decent looking train I reckon.


*approximate classification - even the TRANSWAGGON website doesn't clarify things...

More on the old InterRegio cars...

Following on from the last exciting episode....

The Re 460 was tested, and somewhat unexpectedly, it runs smooth as. I'm impressed, and pleasantly surprised... Obviously it can't haul the whole expanded consist up the grades but I'm very pleased at how well it runs.

I painted over the '2000' logo on the front ends with my 'go-to' SBB red, which was picked up fairly randomly from a model shop in another city a year or so ago. Despite this, it's a perfect match for the Re 460 red straight out of the bottle.

It also seems that the 'chrome SBB directional arrows on the nose' are only appearing on refurbished Re 460s. This program is ongoing as I type this and very few locos had been completed when the Gotthard base tunnel opened, so that's a task I don't have to attempt for this one.

As for the 'old school' green-stripe passenger cars, after reviewing some pics, it was decided that the cream coloured sides on the Marklin models should be painted white. The green is also a little dark for my liking, but as often happens with photograph, in different light the real things seem close to the very dark green (almost black) on the models, so I can live with that. 

So I attempted to carefully paint white over the cream, starting with the roof stripe above the windows.

I wasn't crazy about how neatly this turned out, so for my second attempt, used strips cut from white decal paper over all bits except for the red-logo/SBB/CFF/FFS markings on the side.

Despite being very fiddly with tiny thin strips, with much cursing and rework it turned out ok - certainly good enough when viewed from the mandated distances in Z scale. In the blurry pic taken below you can see the comparison between the cream colour in the upper car (I've painted the end bits white and painted and decaled the roof stripe) and a fully decaled car below (taken before the large decal patches had set smooth). Close enough I reckon.

A final touch was the addition of the very thin black stripe along the white sides (something I had never noticed on the prototype until looking at these pics up close!), which was added with a .05 black pigment marker. This should have a gap with some lettering in it, but I just did the stripe and reckon that looks ok.