Self Contained - Building a container wagon - 2

Just in case you forgot, I'm attempting to building one of these

In the last edition, I’d put together the structural elements of my container wagon - a container load with some bogies underneath.  Now I need to flesh out the actual wagon underframe itself, even though in a reverse of reality, the containers hold things together here and the wagon chassis is just for looks.

The first challenge with the wagon I’ve selected to make (pic above) is that has an edge side sill made of channel or L shaped steel in the center section between the bogies and a full width solid beam (a stick of square section plasticard rod in my case) at the outer ends of the sides. I started experimenting with the center section first, and hit on the idea of simulating the angle with a sheet of plasticard with a super thin sheet of plasticard to simulate the bottom angle of the channel. (He said struggling for steel-engineering-words.) Here’s a sketch:

...and here's how it looks upside down with the “twistlocks”applied, and the solid end bits (complete with attached “twistlocks”) about to go on between the bogies and the container.

One of the things that makes a lot of Z and N models look a bit silly and toylike, is the big high-rider gaps between bogies and underframe needed to provide space for bigger than scale wheels, bogies and couplers. On this, I decided early on to embed the Marklin bogie mount subframe (stolen from the VTG wagon) up inside the containers and this reduce this gap. One of the compromises that I made is that on the real thing the channel section of the sidesill goes out to the bogie bolster but on the model I moved the join inboard a little to clear the bogies. Not that I expect many people would notice.

...and now with those aforementioned solid end square-rod pieces attached.

A prominent feature of these wagons that you can see on the prototype (top pic) is the (ferry tiedown?) hooks that stick out of sidesills above the bogie mount. I’ve stolen these from the VTG wagon. You can see one tiny set of amputated blue hooks on the table in the first model pic of half the the orange container above.

In the pic below these blue sticky-out bits have been attached, and some underfloor detailing added - brake reservoirs, some angles and some flat bits.

A little brass wire was used to add the protective rodding around the blue sticky-out hooks, and one last detail was to fill in the crazy-oversized holes in the roof corners of the orange container which are used to stack model containers on top of each other. I sealed them up with some white round plasticard rod inserted into the previously head-sized openings, and lopped them off flush. In these bottom two pics here you might barely see the handbrake wheel applied to one bogie on each side.

Yeah. A bit more fancy than anticipated as long as you don't look to closely, but not not bad for about three hours work.