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.