AO. A-a-a-a-O. Daylight come and me wan' go home

DB says: I'll head back to DX 5293 for some final cleaning up at some stage, but today, in my first visit to the train room in a week, I thought I might jump into something different. The two obvious candidates are building another module to keep Moana company, or building out that Tranz Alpine passenger train with some AO cars.

I figured I'd better get on to the latter given the real Tranz is getting replaced this year. Don't know why - the guts of those gross fenster 56 foot cars are only about 70 years old...

I want to have 8 of these puppies in my train so I'm going to cast them in resin. I think. I also think, that if that goes to plan, I'll need an end piece (2x required per car of course), and a central tubular section, and probably some underbits. Maybe. Perhaps with some stuck-on big windows. We'll just see how we go shall we?

I began by cutting some end sections out of plasticard, and joining them with some blocky 'doors'. This isn't going to be a terribly sophisticated model, as I'm relying on the 'whole train being more impressive than the sum of the parts' effect, so I somewhat embarassingly stuck-on squares of plastic to represent the door windows, which I'll later paint a dark gray colour rather than cutting out window holes. There'll also be no end doors either, as the corridor connections will hide those except for one at the far end of the train. I'm a bit red-faced over all this, but as long as you promise not to tell anyone, who's going to know?

The roof-end was then carved out of thick styrene block, stuck on top of the other assembly, and some time was expended sanding and filling this to shape as the real thing is quite complicated. While doing this I remembered an offer to buy some bits off Trackgang, but I figured the whitemetal roof and sides would take so much mucking around to fit the big windows, that it was probably easier to build it from scratch. An hour of sanding later and not even having proper windows to show for it, I'm kicking myself...
As I write this (post-picture), the guts of the central section's roof is pretty much done as well - being balsa wood covered in paper.

This may be the only modeling blog in the world where one is led down a meandering path that passes rapid prototyped, laser etched, fancy-dancy models one week and balsa wood and paper ones with no windows the next. Yes folks, there's something in NZ120 for everyone.