Steel Shims

I received another second-hand telescoping steel wagon (UIC classification of 'Shimmns' I believe, which is probably the French or German word for "steel wagon") on yesterday's owl.

While preparing to weather it up to match the two already done, I pulled out the brown DB one that hasn't seen any love yet, and decided to give it a repaint.

New blue SBB and DB brown Shimmnses.

As the SBB ones are a shade of greeny-blue,  dabs of green and a nasty blue watercolour paint were squirted onto a makeshift palette, together with some white, in case things needed to be lightened up a little:

A little blending (I probably over-lightened it):

Close enough for government work:

Some weathering was added after looking at a few prototype pictures, which revealed that the real things are a real mix of sun-bleaching (particularly on the raised bits of the ribbed sides), but also are covered in coal dust and carbon (from the overhead presumably) in the crevices.

As before, this was approximated by drybrushing the bogies with some brown, and washing the body with thinned black and some streaks of browns and light colour. White soft pastel from the "Tamiya Weathering Master" box was applied to the ridges of all four wagons, as can be seen in the mini-mini steel train below, which is passing the Transwaggon train which doesn't seem to have moved far over the past few weeks!

Plodding along

After procuring some little trees and other little supplies from a distant hobby shop yesterday, a rare visit to the trainroom yielded an appropriately little dollop of progress this afternoon.

Although not entirely prototypical (but then again, the real township is less spatially-challenged than my model) I decided to remove my highway overpass -as foretold in a previous post - and replace it with a tunnel portal to give my mini-Wassen-church-hill the impression of more hight.

A portal was constructed from my diminishing stocks of slate roof material and tested for clearance - of which there is minimal...

And then some skinny strips of card used to flesh out the hill after the innards were darkened. 

I'm feeling this will work better than the previous ideas for this wee scene. It's not prototypical, everything is smushed into a tiny space, but such is life when you are building Wassen on a Door. The far end of this tunnel (and its not that far) isn't that easy to see, so will probably remain cavernously open so I can stick a hand in for track cleaning.


Finally, a little paint was splashed onto the parts of the south hill and the nearby top-level adjustments which had a glue-and-yellow-pages shell. The hole in the corner will be the last one on the layout to be filled, remaining open for testing and cleaning until the thing is deemed as bulletproof as its ham-fisted builder can certify.

A Tale of Four Transwaggons - 2

I took those four Habbins (Habbinses? Habbi?) down to the train room and thought - "why not just do them while you're here?"

A splash of Tamiya acrylic silver quickly dealt to the Nordwaggon logos. The roof and ends of the Transwaggon were painted light grey to match the other ones.

My too-small decals were added to the former Nordwaggon at a better height than my earlier efforts, and a little (perhaps too much) weathering applied to them both (washes and chalks).

As you can see, not much has changed on the layout over the past few months.

Another one or two of these 'Waggons' would give me a respectable unit paper train I reckon...

A Tale of Four Transwaggons

I visited a model store in the US last week and was surprised to find that they had quite a decent range of Marklin Z. A shame they didn't have any of the recent 'big' bogie tank cars, but amongst their collection was a pair of 'Habbins' wagons - one lettered up as a Transwaggon (ooo! didn;t even know Marklin had produced these) and one in the Belgian Nordwaggon scheme.

So, even at the exorbitant retail hens-teeth plus taxes prices being charged for these (probably) second-hand units, I couldn't resist picking them up for comparison with my two awful repaints.

The top is my desecrated Marklin Anniversary black one (with red lettering still showing through if you look really hard)

Second is my PanGas repainted into silver with a home made Transwaggon decal - which is a bit small and high up

Third is the Marklin Transwaggon - which is nicely lettered compared to the prototype, and will receive some weathering in the near future

And lastly the Belgian one - I'll be painting over it's Belgian-ness this.

It's been a little quiet lately...

Apologies, I've been doing some 'research' in the land of Swiss.

Not on the Gotthard, alas, but I did see a few interesting and relevant items nonetheless.

And picked up a few modelling materials for the layout as well. Things may be a bit sporadic for a few more weeks, but I promise to get back into Wassen soon.

Town Planning

Something I've been considering for a while with no actual action, is what to do about the tunnel under Wassen's church. I've been back and forth over two options:

1. Have a normal tunnel portal - the 'main street' will disappear behind the hill, the church sits on the hill, and a grassy slope runs down from it to the tunnel portal
2. Have the main road road run in front of all this on a bridge which hides the tunnel portal. The Church is on the hill and the grassy slope runs down to the bridge as usual.

There are pros and cons for both.

In the real Wassen, there is a big motorway that runs between the town's main street and the railway. It crosses the railway on a bridge in front of the tunnel we are discussing, and runs along and just above the railway, crossing over the Wattinger tunnel and Reuess river on another bridge. I've marked it in blue in the map below.

On the layout, I have pulled out my artistic licence (which seems to have expired) and 'merged' the two roads  - with the south end bridge over the creek and the upper Wattinger bridge as it should be, merging into the main road through town. In the below mockup, it then continues as the 'motorway' again over the Muhle tunnel portal.

This is reasonably realistic. It provides a visual break between the church and the railway (in the real thing the church should be higher above the rail level of course.

On the downside, the bridge takes 50 cm of an already short run of visible track on the lower level and hides it, making this the most difficult piece of the layout's track to clean.

Another negative is that being lightly coloured, it might make the vertical 'gap' between the tunnel and the church seem too small (underscoring the church not being perched high enough in the sky.)

It might be the latter that causes me to change my mind (now that I've already started building it).

As you can see, I've also started placing some mockups of building locations just to see what the town might look like.

Wassen looking south from the Church end - the main road through the middle of the pic, the motorway further left. Pic stolen from Vikas Chander

The eyes have it.

I always had great eyesight...

Until a couple of years ago when it turned out that...

I don't.



Back then, after much squinting while driving, I was encouraged to go for an eye test. Glasses for driving made reading street signs much easier, But I'm still ok reading a book or on the computer.

But not so much for working on models. And Z scale isn't exactly the easiest to work in when it comes to kitbashing and cleaning up rolling stock. Over the past few years, my really, really closeup eyesight has me struggling to focus on model rollingstock work.

If you fall into the same boat, may I suggest two visionary tools

1)   $2 glasses from a discount store. These are great for detail work. The downside is that I only find them useful when looking at things up really close, so need to keep flipping them up away from my eyes to find the knife or that paintpot - which is right in front of me but somewhere out in the fuzzy zone that extends beyond my nose when wearing the glasses.

Because of this ok-up-close but impossible-to-focus-further-out, that I've found those closeup (reading) glasses to be a bit headache inducing unless you're only doing closeup work all at once.


2) One of these I find more helpful:

Because it's easy to get closeup assistance when needed by placing items under the magnifier, but your eyes are also free and unencumbered to look at things further out with ease (now, where did I put that knife... hint: in the magnifier).

This example is a fairly cheap one from a craft store with LED lighting you can turn on and off as needed and lots of light is really important to pep up the contrast when your eyesight starts to decline.

An older example I had in the US had a hinged cover to protect the lens which this doesn't have, so some paper is placed on top when it is not in use. By the way, in the picture above taken from a distance, those UFOs are roof lightbulb reflections in the glass that are not visible when in normal use.

I love these magnifiers for painting and assembling fiddly details - if a model looks ok from this close-up then it will look superb from a normal viewing distance.