Marklin's Re 4/4 - Improving the looks - 6 - Fertig

There were a couple of wee things that I had intended to add onto the Re 4/4 a long while back but I completely forgot about them in the interim. Must be my intermittent incredibly-early-onset dementia...

Firstly the air conditioners that sit behind the driver's position (near the front of the port side). These were retrofitted top the real things a decade or so ago; and I see that Marklin's recent 'Gotthard Panorama Express' set has an Re 4/4 included that actually has these A/c units printed on the sides, so here's a rare "well done" bouquet from this blog for them.

I figured I'd print an outline of these onto clear decal paper with my laser printer, but it took several frustrating goes at this.

My first effort in photoshop came out all dotty (600dpi, my buttocks).  So, lacking any sensible vector drawing programs that I'm really au fait with, the accountant in me came out and doodled up something in excel.

I started out with some quite detailed ones, but when printed out to each be about 5mm tall they were all black blobs, so I simplified them and even now they look a bit strong. And now that I write this up they are a little small too, so I might do some more a little bigger for the other 4/4s.

The little white aerials over the starboard side of the cab roof were tiny squares of Plasticard glued on that will probably fall off on its first run. I also drybrushed the bogies and underbits lightly.

Marklin's Re 4/4 - Improving the looks - 5 - Finito

Stock vs improved Marklin Z scale Re 4/4

A few small tasks completed this 4/4 project:

• A small knob of white paint was slopped between the front windows on the UIC plug
• The 'step/platform' protrusion (above the starboard buffer) on the front edge was painted gray to match the prototype (it was silver on the model)
• Added the pantos of course - these looked to be sitting a tad low on the dry run, so they have been raised up further on some tiny rods of styrene
• A dash more weathering was applied to the roof and pantos. As previously mentioned, the 4/4s are kept fairly clean so I decided not to weather the sides and front.

One small irk remains the front silver-edged windows, which on the model have square corners on the outboard side rather than curved like on the corners facing the middle. I suppose a little dollop of red might sort that out but there is a high probability of making a mess doing that. I suppose I should add the rear-view mirrors on the starboard corners too. Someday...

Is all this worth the effort given that the trains will typically be viewed from a distance? Hard to say. While the stock model looks pretty good, the revisions do improve it. The silver roof and scale pantographs do look good, but now the Z scale flextrack looks awful!

I will have to be very careful with those pantos - its easy to forget they are there when you can hardly see them.

Marklin's Re 4/4 - Improving the looks - 4 - Roof

Most of the SBB Re 4/4s that I saw on the Gotthard were clean enough to see that they had a silver/light grey roof:

Whereas the Marklin ones have the same dark grey used at the base of the body. This isn't a terrible faux-pas because the roof weathers with carbon from the pantograph over time, but I felt that painting the roof silver might make an improvement visually.

Before that was done, the bolt hole for the Marklin panto would have to be filled in.

And indeed it was with a rectangle of thin .010 plasticard; and a square of plastruct ladder that had been thinned down a little was attached to the top of this to 'lift' the new panto off the roof a little as the real one is. My structure isn't entirely prototypical but I think it will look fine when the etched panto is glued on top.

Then I decided to bite the bullet and paint the roof silver - a risky endeavor that could end very messily, but with the aid of my magnifying light and a very subtle demarcation line that exists on the shell, it wasn't as hard as I had feared (although in these harsh closeups it looks like I need to touch up one bit that I didn't notice with the naked eye):

Per the prototype, you'll see that the larger grilles were left the Marklin gray colour while the center one was silvered up.

In the above pic you may note some thinned black added to those end grilles and in various shades to the roof as the first step in the weathering process. There seems to be a distinctive pattern to the Re 4/4 tops, with the dark panto-droppings down the centre, and often a little rust on the sides of the cab roof. The locos must be cleaned fairly regularly, as other than the tops of the roof and some occasional fading of the red, most 4/4s I saw at the time were in reasonable nick.

After this pic was taken, some dullcote was sprayed on and chalks applied to make the effect more subtle. More on that tomorrow.

Marklin's Re 4/4 - Improving the looks - 3 - Pantographs

The very day I received my Re 4/4s, a plan was hatched to replace the big ugly Marklin pantographs with finer, non-functional, etched examples.

Sure, etched ones won't go up and down and they won't collect current, but... I don't need them to. I just need them to look better.

As can be seen here, the real things seem almost invisible:

A tad finer and more petite than the model below. Note that the big current collection shoe is almost the full width on the model compared to the proto:

To be fair, the Marklin panto had to be engineered sturdily-enough to operate up and down consistently over a long period of time in the gritty and dirty hard knocks world of model railways; and be wide enough to collect current over the imperfect, tight, wobbly track and catenary setups that are possible on Z scale layouts. Although I'd wager that only a handful of people actually use the overhead current-collection option on marklin layouts. Indeed reading between the lines on a recent Marklin release makes me wonder if they may drop this option in future.

But be that as it may... the plan was to etch some replacements, and the above was drawn in Sketchup eons ago based on a closeup crop of one of my pics:

And after several years of sitting on this, I finally got a mate who is good at this sort of thing to set it up and get a prototype etched in Phosphor Bronze for me by PPD in Scotland. This material is stronger than brass and should be able to take the inevitable bumps and knocks better.

Well, don't those look fine and dandy?  I don't own any 'Blacken-it' chemical etch or gun blue, so applied a low-tech Sharpie black marker pen to them instead before getting out the pliers.


Folded up:

It took about 5 minutes of prodding with pliers, tweezers and confused looks to do this one, so I will refine my technique as I become more familiar with them, which will result in a 'neater' appearance as I had to bend and rebend a few things.

 The phosphor bronze is certainly much more forgiving than brass, and much stronger indeed. You may notice that I folded the lower support strut the wrong way too...

It certainly looks a bit more scale than the old ones... More fiddling will follow.