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.