Cheap and Nasty Container Carrier - 1

(Happy New Year! I'm a bit behind in the blog here, despite doing a little Z amongst other modeling projects of late, so lets make a start in catching up...)

In a misplaced desire to expand my container train beyond its initial two wagons, a plan was hatched to build another sgndd-style 60 foot container flat featuring some Rohukan 20 foot containers on top. Being rib-sided and quite nicely painted up, these are visually different from the AZL and Microtrains 40s (and halved 40s) used so far, but unfortunately, despite being marketed as 1:220th they are a bit underscale in height and width.

Ah well, let's get building anyway.

Marklin Germany refused to sell me Y25 bogies for scratchbuilding projects and while I've since found that  FreudenreichFeinwerktechnik sell Y25s for a reasonable fee, a fair deal was secured last year on a bunch of Marklin 'Schauffele dump cars'. These look far more ridiculous than a US Difco or NZR Yd, but the high-stepping prototype does indeed exist. They were purchased solely with the intention of dispensing with the silly-looking tops and harvesting the bogies for container cars.

The dump cars were separated into their component pieces and the black plastic chassis chopped into thirds once the various weights were prised off (including, rather cleverly, the four vertical air piston cylinders):

The chassis-thirds, comprising bogies complete with headstocks and pivots, were attached into the containers by glueing the headstock onto the container-end and the other end of the chassis onto some plasticard filler thus:

The three containers were then glued together with little plasticard joiners between them for spacing - the edges of the joiner pieces were blacked with a marker pen - as per the picture below. You might also just make out some of the boxy white plasticard filler inside the containers here that the black plastic chassis bits were secured to:

Ta daaa. Now as a one-piece:

A piece of brass strip was then glued to the bottom for additional strength and a little added weight.

So that's the functional pieces stuck together and left to set - as it took all of about 5 minutes to get to this point. Next time, we'll throw some cosmetics onto the sides of the wagon.