Articulation again - sggmrss 90 part 3. Welcome Mr Samskip.

 Today I stuck on my blue laser printed Samskip container sides and roof from the large sheet of container sides I had printed by a print shop up a long time ago. Some of the sides were pictures of mine and others that I perspective-corrected in photoshop, and some were blatantly stolen from the internet. Something I don't approve of, but at least this is not for any commercial purpose.

As mentioned last time, it's lucky I painted the container ends blue because I forgot my master plan and joined the two halves together before sticking the printed container ends on - In the end I didn't use any printed bits on any of the container 'ends', relying on the blue paint. The printed pieces are on the sides and roofs.

 Overall the wagon looks "OK but not great", maybe a 6 or 7 out of 10.

The thing that irks me about the wagon is that I've made the drop-sides a hair shallower than the plan, and coupled with the tall bogies, the whole thing looks like it sits a little high off the rails. This is something that annoys me about many of the the Marklin wagons, and that I have tried to overcome in most of my previous intermodal efforts... yet seem to have failed to notice here until everything was all but finished. It's quite noticeable against the 2x40-footer next to it in the picture above, although the sides are probably a little deep on this one!

Is this fixable? I suppose I could build new deeper drop-sides, but that seems like a lot of rework, so will likely write it off as a lesson learned. When embedded in the train I suppose it doesn't look so bad. I suppose I could also remove the bogies and the brass articulation assembly and mount them further up inside the wagon. This might be more palatable. We shall see

Now I have 11 or 12 intermodal 'wagons' (counting the articulateds as two). Another two or three would make a decent length intermodal train that would suit the layout. Unfortunately my locomotives won't be able to pull a train of that length up the hill anyway!

Here is my prototype pic for comparison. Maybe with some weathering the high-riding sides will be less noticeable. 

 

Articulation again - sggmrss 90 part 2.

This evening I spent an hour or two putting some detail onto the 'wagon sides'. I figured I'd do the same as on the 2x40-footer, so started by putting twistlocks in the corners. D'oh, on 45-foot containers, the twistlocks are inset at the 40-foot mark so that both container sizes can use the same set of twistlocks on a wagon. I should have known that... Rather than rip them off, I just added some extras in the correct places.  These were little cubes cut from .030x.030 inch Evergreen styrene rod.

Some vertical strengthening ribs were added to the deep part of the sides with .010x.020 rod as I had done with the 2x40-footer, which is a lot easier than it looks. 

• I cut a dozen or more little lengths of the rod oversize and put a tiny puddle of styrene glue on something (like waxed paper).
• Pick up a little length of rod by the end using tweezers (gently so so it doesn't ping onto the floor).
• Twist it if necessary so you are holding the rod in the right orientation (I had them so the ribs stick out a wee way(.020) and look skinny from the side (.010)
• Coat most of a long edge in the glue by dabbing it in the puddle. Avoid getting any glue on the tweezers or the rod will stick to them instead of to the wagon side.
• Put it in place. If there is not enough glue, you may need to re-dab the rod in the puddle again.
• Adjust it to be vertical (my built-in 90 degree protractor seems to get less and less accurate each year) and parallel to its neighbours. I decided to to a pair of these ribs at the ends of the drop down and one in the centre - there are loads of different makers and styles of these wagons so this is just "close enough to give the impression of detail." In the real world these are usually placed below the various sets of twistlocks.
• After they have set, put the outside of the wagon down onto something like a block of wood and trim all the excess pieces of the ribs to be the same length as the sides with a sharp knife.

A base piece along the bottom of these sides was added for strength and looks. I should have continued this up the angled parts as well, but decided it wasn't really necessary. And I was feeling lazy. A few other bits were added over the bolsters, and then a touch of grey paint added.

A little blue was dribbled onto the ends and corners of the containers as an experiment. As you will see in the next edition, I'm glad I did this. The 'easy' end bogies also got attached at some stage. 

It's starting to come together....

Articulation again - sggmrss 90 part 1.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I made a nifty articulated pair of 40-foot wagons - (sggrss part 1 ,  part 2 and part 3). I can't believe that was more than six years ago!

A 40-foot set was built because I had some nice 40-foot American Z Lines (AZL) containers on hand, but I never actually saw 40-foot articulated platforms on the Gotthard, they all seemed to be 45-foot pairs. In the alphabet soup that is European wagon classification, these may be called "sggmrss 90." Here is a picture of one I took at Wattinger a long time ago.

So it seems logical to finally make one of these. Once again, the containers will provide most of the structural strength here, so I began this saga some time ago by (badly) sawing a pair of 40 foot containers in half. I think these came from MicroTrains Z scale American doublestack wagons. They were then stuck back together with some styrene rod inside in an expanded position so they were 45 feet long.

A start was then made on the wagon sides, which will hang under the containers. As I don't have much .040x.040 inch styrene strip left, I used skinny .010x.040 for the long top pieces (and will probably regret that later). The 'drop' parts of the sides were made from .010 x .080 using the plan as a guide for cutting the angles.

I started marking the 'inboard' angles with a fine black marker (as above) on the cut pieces before I realised the inboard and outboard angles were the same, so it didn't matter which end was which!

The drop sides were attached to the thin, long underframe pieces with some backing styrene. Of course it does matter which end is which here, as the drop sides are not centred, but located towards the middle of the articulated wagon to clear two axles on the outer ends but only one with the shard bogie in the middle if that makes sense. It goes without saying that I accidentally made three of one side and one of the other! Fortunately I had cut enough pieces for 8 sides (with a plan to make two wagons before I hit on a smarter way to make these).

Then it was time to attack the bogies, or drehgestell if you prefer. These came from my weird-looking Marklin 82434 Schauffele dump cars that were purchased for their Y25 bogies because they were the least costly wagons available at the time.

The two end bogies are easy to install with their attached frames, but the center bogie has to be popped off and have its mushroom-shaped mounting pin and the coupler removed. Note that the inboard face of the coupler remains, as this helps hold the wheel in.

Then it was carefully drilled for the brass screw (as the bogie is made from that tough, shiny plastic: carefully). Two articulating brass pieces were then prepared which will be attached under the containers.  Although plastic washers (from N scale Microtrains bogies) will be used to separate the bogie away from the brass strips, I shape the lower one to make sure there is no chance the brass will impede the turning of the bogie or cause an electrical short if the wheel flanges touch it. 

This lower piece of brass has been shaped with a file in the picture above. Hardly a work of art, but nobody should ever see it again. A brass screw is used so it can be soldered to the top piece of brass, which has been prepared in the picture below.

Two Microtrains washers were used (rather than one visible here). 

All soldered up. Carefully! The top of the screw was then cut off with a Dremel, taking pauses to prevent everything getting to hot. The whole assembly swivels as it should. Its a little tighter than the 40-foot model, but there seems to be enough play.

Regunking the EANOS

While I was pottering away with the scenery on North Wattinger, someone posted a picture on Facebook or somewhere of a nicely weathered SBB EANOS wagon in HO scale, a bit like my pink Marklin Z one. 

So using his one for ideas, I dug mine out and added a little more rust and dust and grime on top of what was already there - looking back, I'm not sure I have ever posted anything about this wagon. 

Some ordinary thinned acrylic paint plus some rust and grime washes were used. It looks a bit overdone, stark and harsh in these closeup pics...

...but looks OK from the mandated viewing distance below (pic from the previous post on North Wattinger).

I didn't like the pink colour scheme originally and was going to repaint in grey, but the pink has grown on me as it is something a little different.

The load that came with this has always looked a little boring, even with some additions on top of the factory load, so I might make it carry logs one day.

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. 

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.

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. 

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:

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.

Another grey SGNSS container wagon - with a flat rack - 1

Well I think they're called SGNSS wagons. When it comes to modern European wagons, there seem to be many, many, many class variations with an alphabet soup of letter combinations. Each letter means something with respect to length, loading gauge, capacity and so forth... so if you know the UIC codes, you know that this wagon is for your application. All I remember is that S usually means some sort of bogie flat or covered-flat wagon.

But I digress... this time I'll try to remember to take some pictures.

I started with that black Marklin chassis from last time, extracted from under one of these red sliding covered wagons as above.

Popped the bogies off and got filing with my fairly primitive file - by hand and with no vice since were still in covid-lockdown here and my vice is at the other end of town... I'm not sure that would be an 'essential journey'.

No matter, it didn't take as long as I remembered. Incidentally I found the Dremel useless for this task, but may have been using the wrong grindy-thing.

As with last time, I filed down the sides until I was into the 'twist lock dimples' cast into the wagon top (those with good eyes might can see the left edge has been thinned inwards in the image above).

As these wagons are 60 feet long, and I still have a few 40 foot containers ex AZL and Microtrains US doublestack cars, a cunning plan was hatched to do something different at the 20-foot end this time and build a 20 foot collapsable 'flat rack' open container to fill it. Something like this, as stolen from the World Wide Image Repository:

In the image below you can see this starting to take shape at the top of the pic.

The black 20-foot base is half of the ribbed bottom insert from the grey 40-foot Maersk container, and the ends are squares cut out of Plastruct ribbed sheet from my plastic bag full of plastic bits. I faced the ribbed side of the sheet ''inwards' as they will be seen more easily from inside the wagon. One outside face of the flatpack ends can remain plain, as it will be hidden by the 40-footer, the other plain end will be exposed at the end of the wagon so I scribed 7 vertical lines into it as can be seen in the pic. You might squint and see that one of my lines went off into the wilderness so I smoothed it down and hope the paint will hide it enough.

As can be seen above, the 'ends' of the 40 foot container were once again cut away at the bottom (or the top side here as it's upside down in that pic) to allow the container sides to hang down over the Marklin flat car chassis. The metal chassis is too thick to perch containers on top of convincingly,  so this makes the wagon look thinner and the containers look like they are sitting much closer to the rails. The flat rack will be built with sides that hang down as well for the same effect.

Once the wagon had been thinned enough to fit snugly between the container sides, it was primed and set aside. Otherwise I would have finished the wagon today!


The flat rack was supposed to be a quick and dirty job but it started to look reasonably decent, so I perched some twist lock housings on the top corners and used I-beam Plastruct with one edge filed down (to turn it into a tall C-channel) as the sides - the bit that hangs down over the thinned wagon chassis.

Some miscellaneous details and ribs were added into that C-channel and the whole thing was painted with a made-up shade of blue and weathered with washes and dry-brushed browns and greys.

To represent a load,  Plastruct round rod about 3mm in diameter was painted brown to represent pipes, cut into 2cm lengths, and these were carefully stacked and glued with dots of white PVA onto four short cross-pieces of stained stripwood.

This can be seen under construction above. The icing on the tiny cake was provided by some stripped electrical wire, which revealed many strands of very fine wire. I grabbed two of these and twisted them up into a silver rope. This can be seen in the bottom-right corner above.

Two of these ropes were wound around the load and twisted together underneath. The whole shebang was glued down to the blue flat rack.

Rust-coloured weathering chalks were splotched on the pipes for effect.

She's looking good, Vern.