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. 

PostBus - Adventures in Shapeways

Another Shapeways item that has been squatting on the layout for a few months is a PostBus (or 'PostAuto' in Swiss-German).

These distinctive yellow busses are a common sight along a web of 862 obscure routes throughout the tiny country, and are a useful way to travel about to railfanning locations once the train has gotten you as close as it can.

Again there are many different suppliers of busses and slight differences in livery, but they all follow a similar colour style.

And just to make my job more difficult, instead of buying a 1:220 Z scale bus, I decided to get a 1:300 one (again from Mr Steffan's Z shop) to force some perspective into the scenes, as the bus will be sitting between (but away from) three sets of tracks on the layout. The model is a slightly older bus shape, but hopefully only the bus enthusiasts will notice...

So I painted the roof of the Shapeways core white, and then started to 'paint' in the black window layer using a Sharpie marker pen. This all went swimmingly (fortunately the prototypes have solid black area around the dark windows - rather than picking out the pillars between the windows in yellow for example).

First coat

Then some crappy $1 yellow (must get some proper paints one of these days) was mixed with a dot of nice red and this made the sides look ok... but it seemed I would need to put that red stripe in somehow as the whole thing looked unfinished without it.

After a minute of bumbling around the possibilities, I hit upon the idea of painting a superfine Details Associates brass wire red, folding it as needed and supergluing it to the bus. Here you see it going on the side before being folded around the back and the other side.

Red stripe wire attached and sticking out the back before bending

This actually turned out rather well - as long as you don't look to closely!

Blobs of paint in approximately the right colours and shapes were added to represent head and tail lights and numberplates.

For the PostBus logo on the sides, I applied a diagonal line of white and feathered it off after a few mm towards the back and painted a guesstimate of the PostAuto horn logo. Not completely terrible for a hand-painted logo on a 1:300 model. I started with a grey representation of the horn outline, then tried to do yellow inside that, but ended with a mess in the circular bit, so put a dab of white in the middle and and it looks quite convincing on this side - the other doesn't look as good, so the bus will be going towards Wassen, as had been planned. If the logo had been better on the far side, it would have ended up as an outbound bus service!

Baby PostBus

In place on the road below, you can see the forced perspective look of the smaller scale bus. It will eventually be located on the bridge just to the left.

Farm truck - Adventures in Shapeways

Swiss farms are a sight to behold. Up the ridiculously-steep sides of mountains in all manner of remote and high-altitude spots, tidy mats of green pepper the landscape with nary a weed to mar the picture-perfect scenes.

To work the slopes, they have developed some awesome tools that usually come out when the hay is being harvested

Sickle mowers with mega-traction all terrain wheels:

...and these farm trucks that seem to be able to ascend near-vertical slopes:

I guess there are many makers and variations on these trucks. I can't find a good picture of one that I took, so here's one borrowed from the internet:




"Steffen's Z Bahn Shop'" has made a farm truck in Z scale and made it available on Shapeways, so I ordered one.

It's really nice. All I had to do is paint it and put some hay in the back.