The 3-6 ZA Wagon

 DB says:

As soon as Mr Holden's 3-foot-6 Emporium listed the ZA wagon a year ago, I snapped up a pair, but they have sat in my pile of yet-to-be-started projects on the bench since.

These are perhaps the best 3D prints I have received. 

I'm usually a fettler and adjuster when it comes to procured items, but for this I basically applied some paint and stuck some bogies under it. 

Two sections of the below-the-belt trusses were a bit wobbly, so they got replaced. There was also some bowing of the sides in places, so on this, I've tried simply gluing a plate across the bottom to see if that holds things together, clamped while setting. I also buzzed off the underends to give space for the couplers attached to the Microtrains bogies.

Nicely proportioned, this, and some great detail in the roof and side ribs. 

I added the little white door handles (six per side) to add a little spice, and the yellow plate for the numbers. Note the quite accurate (to my eye) variations in the roof and door ribs, door detail, and detail below the bottom door rails too. There is a little strata visible under the scanning electron microscope, but its not noticeable from normal viewing distances.

Few dramas here. It will probably need a little weight, and a some weathering will come.

If you were ever wanting to get a 3d print, this should be it, firstly the detail is great, secondly these wagons were all over the place from the mid 70s until the early 2000s, and lastly, these are almost impossible to make convincingly yourself!

Little Coal Wagons - LCs 2

 DB continues from last time:

After painting the 10 new LCs brown, all manner of weathering was applied with various colours and shades of washes.  The intent being to make the 10 wagons look 'uniform but all different'. Some a little redder, a few a little yellower, a few a little greyer, a few a little blacker and so on. A few patches of fresh repair paint here and there, a few blobs of rust, and so on. Where the effects were a bit strong, I went back and mellowed it a little. I may do more of that, and will dullcote the whole lot to take any remaining sheen off.

Something I forgot to mention yesterday is that these Trackgang LC side and end castings are just superb. Fine, crisp detail without any casting flaws and no noticeable flash. Whoever made these masters deserves some quiet applause. Next time I'll get Russell to assemble them for me  :)

As a finishing touch, black patches for 'Lyttelton Coal Traffic' stencilling were added above the yellow number patches on the new LC wagons, most of my other 'nice' LCs (a few can remain in a general goods train or join the coal train if needed) and all my 'less-nice' old scungy castings. Those ugly old fellas are a bit sub-par, but smuggling a few of them into a long train to make up numbers might not be noticed. And they're a bit of NZ120 history! 

Annoyingly, I went through a few photo books after painting the black squares, and found that those  'Lyttelton Coal Traffic' patches are probably a bit 'late 80s' for my liking, and not all the wagons on the trains had them anyway! D'oh.  So I painted over the patches on two of the new wagons and some of the old ones with body colour brown. 

As I don't have the ability to print white on my Alps printer at the moment, I made up a simple spreadsheet like so and printed it on white decal paper with a laser printer: 

This came out better than expected, and once I had my production line process sorted, it was quite therapeutic to add these decals to about 20 wagons. If there was any white showing at the cut edges of the decals it was touched up with black paint later on.

Then a set of wagon numbers was made up for the new wagons (and a ton of my old wagons) and printed on clear decal sheet. Most of these are actually real TMS numbers, but some were made up - its not as if I can read them unaided anyway!

To clarify, I can read, I just can't see.

And as an aside, here is a comparison of various sample LC models I have, starting with three embarassing survivors of the old bog casting factory from about 1992. For some reason I've hung onto about 15 of these well-travelled models. The masters were made with plastic sides and stripwood for the bodyside ribs, as this was before Plastruct rods were freely available. The four (very subtle, barely visible) 'bumps' on the sides (for internal rope lashing on the prototypes) were blobs of PVA! I made two masters as the first RTV mould broke up after a while, and the second one had integral little rectangular knobs underneath to hold the Peco couplers down. Note the bottom model in the pic is on a stretched 10-foot Peco chassis, the middle one on a Fleishman chassis with unusual metal wheels, and the top one on the usual 15-foot Peco. The Flashfix bondo bog stuff was often hard to get into the nooks and crannies of the rubber moulds and bits have broken off in the subsequent 30 years. Rather than being a 'proper' two piece mould, I remember forcing triangular pieces of rubber down into the top of the poured Flashfix to 'remove' material from inside the walls where I wanted the coal to be. Fortunately, the bog was easy to carve as it went off, so one could further thin the walls and open up that space for the coal. As usual, the two foot rule (perhaps even extended to "nobody should look at these from less than a four foot radius), will be vigorously enforced...

Next up below are two similar but different models, and I'm not sure where they came from. Note that the lower one doesn't have the lashing bumps, and its a very crisp casting. They might have been purchased from Rod Murgatroyd, or Rhys, or was it Cross Creek that made a few tops? The one that I've added a ridgepole to is modelled as an LB, with spoked wheels stolen from a 10-foot Peco chassis. Technically its the only one that can legally have the round Peco axlebox, although some LCs received roller bearings in their later years.  The door detail is nicely done on this, but the oversized lumps on the sides are a bit hard to decal and paint around. Maybe I even made these myself. I must go back through the blog as a memory stirrer.

And then three-foot-six 3D prints, some of the details being more chunky in nature, but being one piece, they certainly go together easily! The top one has a strata line, and the lower one I've (incorrectly!) modified the upper doors. I must check these, but I think I removed some underframe/sill material to have the tops sit lower on the Peco chassis. 

And lastly six of the ten "new" Trackgang bodies on Peco chassis that this series of postings is about. Nice fine crisp detail. 

Next we will give them a shot of Dulcote, add a few little details and, plop some coal in.

Little coal wagons - LCs

 DB says:

Back in the Otaki to Cass era, Rhys and I had a really cool four wheeled coal train of about 35 LCs. These were all cast jobs, with mine being a little rough to say the least, being my first foray into casting with automotive bog and homemade masters and RTV moulds.  I still have about 15 of these somewhat embarrassing specimens that are almost 35 years old now. Of course, back then, the CB hoppers were only a few years old, so the long trains of little four wheelers were still fresh in the mind and pretty groovy. And they still are.

Some months ago, I noticed that Russell Trackgang had some LC tops available, so I bought 10 for a very reasonable price. These have sat in my pile of unstarted projects for many months, but in early October we had a big rainstorm that necessitated a round-the-clock flood watch in the basement,  so I decided to knock these together.  While I'd always planned to just have a few highsiders to put into an 80s goods train, the idea of a west coast coal train raised its head. 

With my poor history of assembling whitemetal models, I decided to be clever this time by sticking a side and an end together with 'superglue gel' around a 90 degree wooden end, then I'd simply link these pairs up. Pretty soon I had all twenty corners assembled with minimal fuss. Unfortunately only about two were actually at 90 degrees, so when I stuck them together, 90% of the them were wonky. Many were broken apart and reset, many ended up as four sides on the floor or stuck to fingers. I eventually got them together.

Then I found upon returning to the project that most of these had badly meeting corners, or were rhomboid in shape, or didn't have parallel walls, or did not sit flat, so I was only able to put a floor and chassis into one of the 10!

The others got broken apart, cleaned of glue, and a new strategy attempted, whereby I cut a set of plastic floors to size, then glued a side to this it at 90 degrees, then an end (usually finding my side wasn't at 90 degrees when finding the end would go on crooked) but I eventually managed to encircle the floors with sides and ends. This took about two months of periodic effort, with pauses to replenish my swear words reservoir and unstick fingers, walls, and regain mental composure after 'completed' tops would collapse in a pile of superglue while tweaking them.

Eventually all 10 were assembled and reinforced with contact glue (woohoo!) , and Peco underframes were prepared. You'll note that the floors are relatively high up - after looking at a few prototype pics and a plan, I think its a flaw of most of my previous models that the wagon tops don't sit low enough on the chassis.

One wagon was prepared to go next to the locos by having a Microtrains coupler:

Time for some primer:

And some paint. After a visit to the local bike shop to see what they had in stock I settled on the reddish-brown Tamiya XF-9 Hull Red as the base colour. 

Studholme 11 - more trackwork

 DB says:

'The schedule' allowed a few hours back on the Studholme modules today. 

It has now been more than a year since I started this, further cementing the blog's status as holder of the Guinness record for longest-average-elapsed-time module builds (thanks also to Paekakariki and Waihao Forks). Clearly long gone are those youthful days of blitzkrieging up a module in a week.

Its been a warm 10 days down here on The Mainland, and a kink revealed itself upon my arrival. Half a mm of rail was taken out of that track and the thing reconnected. All the other tracks seem fine, as a little space was allowed for this in the rail joints.

Some manual point controls have been added to the points on the Waimate Branch (backdrop) side of the layout. 

The three 'mainline' points at either end of the module set will be the most used, so are being made DCC friendly (whatever that means) and each is controlled by a slide switch discretely mounted at the side of the layout, via piano wire.

The four other points on the branch side are 'as-is' Peco points, controlled by more of this chunky piano wire and covered with some oversized tubing in a most agricultural fashion. speaking of agricultural, I see the code 55 Waimate Junction Y here still has some code 80 tails soldered onto it from its last use! They remain in place as the only code 80 on the modules!!

The three points on the other side (east side with access to the goods shed and fruit siding) are as-is with no remote control at this stage. I doubt they'll be used much, but if they are, I suppose I could work them with some actuating wire under the module.

So track has today been fixed down right up to the three south end mainline points, which I still need to make DCC-friendly. The coal/seed siding was also spaced further out as it looked a little close to the others. Darryl P suggested extending the coal/seed siding to serve stockyards there, which might be feasible. I certainly want to have the Studholme Hotel modelled as a flat, and the stockyards should/could be to the south of this, and a good way of fitting something small into the thin gap between the branch's curved point and the backdrop. We shall see.

The 2010s-era 17-wagon coal train was laid out on the loop to check sizing. As predicted, the loop is about 10cm short, so I'll have to drop a wagon if I want the train completely ensconced, although a train this length would be fine in reality, as it's in and clear clear of the mainline for crossings, and an oncoming shorter train can safely run into the siding (closer to the camera in the pic above), although some shuffling of the coalie for-and-aft might be required to let the shorter train out. In hindsight I should have positioned the mainline points out closer to the ends of the module set, but its a bit hard to move them now.