An ETR610/RABe 503 in Z scale? - 1

Of all the 'plastic' passenger trains over the Gotthard, I reckon the ETR600/ 610 / RABe 503 design shared by SBB and Trenitalia are the sexiest - far sleeker than the older ETR 470 and blobby RABDe500s.

Near Silenen

So imagine my surprise when I found them available on Shapeways.

Very nicely modeled (and well printed too, Mr Shapeways).  Until they release a clear plastic material for printing window inserts, I'd have made the windows filled-in, but this shouldn't be a drama as they are in a black panel anyway. Given the small scale, I'll probably pop a sandwich of black plastic and glazing behind the window openings.

As for power, this is yet to be determined based on testing, but the two contenders are: 

• A Rohukan three-car Shinkansen - surprisingly, the middle car is powered and not the ends as expected
• Three Rohukan 'shorty' power cars (the wee black one below). Given the low price of these, I figured they were unpowered trailers that I'd harvest bogies off for the other three cars, but it turns out they are powered...

The original plan was to use two powered Shinkansen cars and have the rest of the cars unpowered (but as I say, it turns out I only have one power car). 

Depending on how these types play together and how much power I need to get up my grades, I may use the Shinkansen on its own towing unpowered Shorties, or just the Shorties, or a mix on the train. 

The Shorties will be lengthened of course, and the Shinkansen sets (or the car shells above them) need to be adjusted a little too. The Shinkansen chassis is surprisingly wide too, so needs a bit of thinning. I had hoped to use the undersides as they are, as they came with some nice side skirt detail that looks about right, but they are two wide for the Shapeways tops.

I'll leave you in suspense for a few weeks here, as I am being forced to go to Europe for some more 'field research'.

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.

Tanktainers in Z Scale

I've always wanted a few tanktainers in my intermodal train, and they were reasonably common on the tracks around Wassen in the good old days - as one of my Wattinger pics taken in 2015 attests. As can be seen, the prototypes come in various lengths and the bracing and tank shapes take many forms.

For a year or more I've wondered about using styrene tube or bits of old plastic pens for the tanks and building the frames out of Plasticard, but then someone called Ngineer goes and puts a pair of 20 footers on Shapeways at a reasonable price. And that's hard to resist.

The parcel arrived promptly. It's been four or five years since I've ordered anything on Shapeways, and these seem to be of much higher print resolution - thus exhibiting far less visible strata - than those early examples. Possibly this is a new material too.

The downside is that there are a few warped bits as you might see in the above pic (before the pair were seperated). I'm not sure if this is due to the material, or heating in transit, or squeezing in transit, or possibly the designer expecting too much of the thin and flimsy unsupported material. The latter might explain the long top rails, but that there are also kinks in some of the short lower struts but not others make me wonder if this print might have been removed and mis-handled too quickly before it really hardened.

Interestingly, these tanks are a similar size to the Rokuhan Z scale 20 foot containers (in blue below) - which are noticeably smaller than the Microtrains or AZL American doublestack behind. Heights vary, but an ISO width should be an ISO width in Z scale, so the products of one of these two camps aren't to scale. Must have a measure one day.

The offending pre-mentioned saggy bits were removed, and some paint was slopped on:

Replacement framing from thin styrene strip being installed:

And that was as complex as I decided to go for now. Roofwalks, ladders and railings might be added at some later stage.

As for prototypes, I've had a Bertschi and a Den Hartogh in mind for a while now, and had doodled up some artwork for them a long time ago. This was printed out on a colour laser printer today, cut out, glued on, and voila's your uncle.

Decals would have been better than a thick sheet of printer paper of course, but not dramatically so for those of us that vigorously enforce the mandated minimum viewing distances, and this worked out pretty cheaply as I printed off a few other things on the same sheet (plus spares of these in case of screw-ups or if more are desired in future).

The finished-ish containers are perched here on a Marklin flat chassis with the blue Rokuhan 20 footer for the pics, but these bits will be made into a 'proper' wagon at some stage.

The Bertschi brown should be a smidge redder, but I can live with that for now.