Command Post Culvert

Up at the Command Post, there's a fairly well-known culvert that tends to crop up in pictures.

More of my favourite plastic slate roofing material was used for the culvert facing. A hole was drilled and cut down to make the opening for the culvert itself, and a little grass was PVA'd on top. A second piece was placed behind for the upper row of stones.

 Some boxing for the lower part was made to 'contain' the hole.

 A wash of grey:

 A little darker drybrushing, and if the handrails look a little familiar, they're from an N scale sd40-2.

To install the culvert, a little cut was made downhill from the Command Post, perhaps a little too far down, but the landforms in place suggested this is where it should go. 

The fabrication was glued in place and the area tidied up.

Mmm, chunky track. Perhaps I should have painted it black?!

While the layout couldn't have been made much longer under my self-imposed constraints, oh how I wish this little stretch of track was longer...

Making (north) mountains out of a molehill

Some glue and paper shell added today on top of the cardboard strip mesh on the north hill.

Who knows what model railroaders will do when they stop making phone directories.

As you might have noticed from a close perusal of the North End, in our town, we get a combined White and Yellow Pages, just to add a bit of spice.

A touch of green paint from the dollar store (2D scenery in a tube) and it's starting to look more like a model railway.

Being Articulate - sggrss 3

A splash of paint and the sggrss articulated flat will be ready to take on the world.... or at least the layout.

As with most of the Euro articulated stock there are may detail variations and plenty of paint schemes - gray, blue, red, brown, yellow, green, black to name a few I've googled recently.

I decided to make a dark gray one for no real reason other than its something different and the brighter colours tend to highlight the shortness of the 40 foot platforms and the droopy hanging sides which, as I mentioned earlier, look a little odd being offset inboard from where the containers sit.

So some grey was slopped on - as I mixed it to taste, I ended up with a few different shades, which I rather like. Many of these wagons seem to have sections with the numbers/data that get cleaned more often than the other bits, so there is often quite a bit of variation in the prototypes.

Yellow was applied to the tie-down-extension-pipes and to represent twistlocks. I should have used tiny squares of plastic for these since I put so much effort on those vertical strakes.  The containers had been weathered earlier and the wagon might get the same treatment at some stage.

And there you have it. It looks pretty decent and the 2x40 footer doesn't look as silly as I had feared. 

Soon enough I'll get the layout running again and we will see how well it runs!

Being Articulate - sggrss 2

So at the end of last night's exciting episode, the sggrss 2x40 foot wagon was left structurally complete and now needs a little fleshing out.

The long sill piece that runs along the length of the wagon was made from Evergreen .043x.043 styrene rod cut to length. Underneath this, to represent the trapezoidal girder extension that hangs down between the bogies, a strip of .125x.125 rod was cut to length, beveled to shape and tacked on. Ideally I would have used a rectangular shape for the drop-piece rather than a square section, but this is what I had on hand in my large bag of styrene bits:

Of course you have to remember that these must be made in left and right handed pieces, two of each:

Once these are complete and tested to fit amongst the running gear, you can go to town with any detailing you want to add:

As can be seen from the above, the 'tiedown' piece that sticks out above the bogies was added and some angled end pieces over the center-bogie ends were chunked up from .043 rod and attached with plastic glue.

A vague representation of some of the vertical bracing that usually sits beneath each twistlock was also added. This was cut from .010x.020 styrene rod and painstakingly added under a magnifier and maneuvered into an approximation of the vertical.

The bottom lip of the whole shebang was added under the drop section using some .010x.156 that happened to emerge from the plastic-bag. It was scored, gently folded and glued in place. Aesthetically, it would have been nice to run this under the whole frame, not just the drop-section, but I left it off the bogie areas for clearance reasons.

In smaller scale modelling, the trade-off between potential derailment risk and perfect detail always favours good running or you get frustrated quickly....

Being naturally lazy, and being that you have to do four sides worth of any detail you add, I was a bit 'minimal' here on these sides (albeit better than the last wagon constructed!), but I think it's enough to give the impression of detail.

Being Articulate - sggrss 1

I really liked the articulated container wagons that were fairly common on the Gotthard intermodal trains, even though they might be a bit advanced for this junior-level Z scale modeler.

These are two-unit container flat wagons that pivot over a central bogie, and they come in a number of lengths - the most common ones seem to be a pair of 45 foot platforms as this length of container is pretty common in Europe.

My issue with building one of the 45s straight away is that... I don't have any 45 foot containers. So I'll start with 40 foot platforms first (the "sggrss" UIC wagion code) as a bit of an experiment - mainly because my container wagon building strategy to date has involved using containers as the primary structural element!

I'm not sure I saw any twin-40s on any trains on the Pass, but they obviously exist in Switzerland based on this stolen picture:

And here is one that I took, which could be 40s in front of the pusher:

While some of the articulated wagons have thin side sills, most have those angled-drop-girder-beam sides as quite visible in the top picture. The shorty-40s of these look a little skewiff compared to the 45s because the containers are not as well-'centred' over those beams that hang down between the bogies.

...

So again starting with a pair of 40 foot containers borrowed from AZL US doublestack cars and bogies off the Schauffele dump cars that were purchased for this purpose...

The dump car chassis were harvested and cut in half. Some plastic filler was inserted into one end of the containers and the bogies inserted to make up the non-articulated end:

A false plastic floor was inserted into the other end of the container to serve as a base for the articulating end. This was a bit premature as the heights of these needed to be adjusted several times later on. On this false floor will sit a brass 'subframe' that will extend out over the centre bogie which is drilled through to accept a screw which will join the pivoting brass platform halves together. 

The washers are from Microtrains N scale bogies and will be used to lift the brass subframe away from metal wheels:

The general concept and parts for the articulation mechanism are below... You can see the filed notches made in the lower brass subframe to allow the wheel flanges to pivot without hitting the sides of the brass. In actuality I had problems with these fine screws breaking when trying to screw them into the brass, so I ended up using a larger brass screw and soldering it to the 'top' of the two brass platform sub frames as can be seen below.

The two pivoting brass subframes and the bogie secured with a brass screw that is soldered to the 'top' brass platform (at the bottom in this upside down picture):

After a lot of trial and error - mainly involving trying various false floor heights inside the containers until the thing sat level; and making sure there was enough 'play' in the "mechanism" to allow the thing to pivot around tight Z scale curves - we have the structural elements of the wagon complete:

Cheap and Nasty Container Carrier - 2

To finish off this nasty and quick container wagon, a strip of square section plastruct rod was secured along the bottom of the containers and a trapezoidal drop-side added from sturdier rod as a representation of the platform body.

Rather than add a lot of details, I scribed in some vertical lines to represent the stiffening ribs (which should have been done properly as '3d' items but couldn't really be bothered for this wagon. I also painted on twistlocks in yellow and took a picture of it.

It looked blah, so I added the tie-down extensions above the bogie bolsters using squares of plasticard rod, and the protective pipe-bits around them using fine wire. Then I added squares of fine plasticard to represent the twistlocks over my badly painted jobs.

I didn't take many pictures of these steps in the tidying up of this quick and dirty wagon as I wasn't that enamoured with it during the process.

But after repainting some grey over the mess and picking out the twistlocks and tiedown extensions carefully in yellow, plus some random squares in white to represent fictional reflector strips and signs it doesn't look to horrible after all.

This is a trick I learned in 1:120 - painting on some random squares here and there and picking out details can make a model look a lot more detailed than it actually is. I've recently added such paint-'lies' to the blue wagon as well and it has tarted that up quite nicely as well.

A little weathering was applied using Tamiya Weathering Master soft pastels - mainly brown streaks on the wagon body and a little white and black on the containers, over acrylic washes that had been pre-applied.

Sure the containers are a bit small, but on the real Gotthard trains, the containers and swapbodies come in all sizes and shapes so this doesn't look so bad hidden amongst a string of wagons now that it has been finished off.

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.