Balls of Cement - URC Sputnik Wagon

 DB says:

I received a care package from 3 Foot 6 models yesterday. 

There are some impressive items within it, and I'm pleased to say that the quality is superb. Lewis mentioned a few months back that he has changed up his processes and the results really show here. No strata! Flat surfaces! Straight edges! No sags! Even the resin seems slightly less brittle and a little more forgiving, unless you drop something onto concrete from a height that is...

But more on that in a moment.

Its been a while since I have 'made something' with wheels, so why not let 3'-6 do most of the work and I'll finish things off. 

A prototype that I've always wanted is a cement wagon or two. There were two main bogie tank styles - these spherical Sputnik URCs, and the UBCs that came with either spherical or flat sided tanks with more conical tops. These are appropriate from the late steam era through until the mid 1990s. 

Here is a URC laid up at Taita in the early 90s.

The 3-6 one, which I believe was designed up by Simon Lister, is a Sputnik type. So that's what I'm making, and handily I have the picture above. There are a few wagons preserved too:  https://www.nzrsr.co.nz - search for URC in class. One has a picture showing the piping on the other side. There is also one UBC of the other shape preserved. David Mac's rolling stock register is a great resource for remembering what older wagons looked like without having to go and see them.

The 3D print quality here is great. Despite these being spherical surfaces, there is no strata at all on this print, the tubs are smooth and completely free of facets, the flat surface of the wagon top is completely perfect. There is not even any warp in the sides or the truss rods, or in the width of the trusses. The only slight blemish is in one of the corners, but its so minor I'm not going to touch it. There is a slight ring around each of the four cement balls (in the top half). I'm not sure if this is intentional from the design or a slight printing defect but I gave them a quick ineffective rub with some fine sandpaper that must have last been used on something yellow.

The four lids were glued on top, as these are printed as separate parts. I needed to open up the holes for these slightly in two of the balls. 

Then I did my usual removal of coupling pockets and shortening the bogie mounting points so the wagon will sit lower.

About this stage I managed to drop the whole thing onto the concrete floor. I can never manage to hit the little carpet mat under me and am finding such fumbles are one of many perils of getting older. 

The terminus of the dropping motion all but snapped the frame in half and removed two of the balls. Bugger. Some glue had it back together in short order. I put some steel wire (my point rodding) under the wagon floor to keep things together and flat.

I then had the clever idea of enlarging the two central holes in the bottom to fit some chunky short steel screws into. This would add some much needed weight to the wagon. I very slowly and carefully drilled these out to the required size, being careful not to damage the truss rod cross braces. This took a while at very slow RPMs. After all that care, I realised I'd need to remove the cross pieces anyway to fit the screw heads. D'oh.

The cross pieces were replaced with some thin styrene strip. The above pic shows the underframe with its removals, additions and repairs.

Then the action moved topside. After a 'first coat' of painting, I added the two platforms between the sets of tanks out of some scribed wood that was lying on my desk, and some ladders which are Marks Model Works CB ladders, some of the most useful things you can buy. I've can used these on many models. If they were a little longer and I was a little smarter, I might have tried shaping them better and making the nice hoopy bits on the top. I could have used some brass wire here. Maybe I will. Nah, that's never going to happen. 

But some .020 Evergreen styrene rod made some pipes on the deck, and along the side that doesn't have the ladders. 

And then it was time for paint and weathering. The base wagon is flat black, and the tops Tamiya Royal Light Grey. Weathering was a little brown wash on the truss rods, and on the top some pale grey Vallejo Game Wash and white Jacquard Pinata Alcohol Ink wash, running from the top down, and concentrating on the top half of the spheres. A little rust was dabbed on in places too. I may go back with the white ink at some stage, but then again its a subtle effect and I will use these on trains at their 'early to mid-life'  - either 1960s steam or behind 1980s DJs. So before they got really scungy.

The wagon was shod with some Kato Japanese 'Taki' tank wagon bogies that were reviewed here a decade or more ago. I used these rather the usual than MicroTrains ones because I will be running this among four-wheeled wagons which have Rapido couplers, as do these bogies. These also have a longer wheelbase and slightly larger wheels than the MT ones.

Sometimes the manufacturers, Kato especially, make spare parts available when they rerun certain models, but usually in limited numbers. I put these bogies on my Hobbysearch Japan wish list quite a while ago, and also some bogies that might suit a 30 foot guards van. When they all briefly showed up as orderable recently, I snagged a few sets and they arrived a couple of days ago. As this is typed, I'm not sure how much they cost.

The final touch, done after these pictures were taken, was to spray a little Dullcote on. The mysterious 'rings' on the top quarter of the tanks show up a bit in the photos, but aren't that noticeable when you're staring at the wagon going by. The Dullcote may help too. The bendiness in the second to last pic is due to the phone wide angle/close up, not any printing problems! 

Other than waiting for things to set this was a pretty quick project, taking about two hours up until the weathering.  

The most tricky job with all these resin bogie wagon prints is getting the bogie mounting points to take screws. I'm not sure what the perfect answer is here as different bogie manufacturers require different sized screws or mounting techniques. Every screw I've tried on a 3D print has trouble biting into the tough resin, even if you enlarge the hole very generously. And sometimes the mounting piece will crack or break off while you are doing this, or you end up damaging your nicely detailed wagon. 

What worked with this URC, on the third attempt at enlarging the holes, was discovering that I own a small 'tap' which scours out a thread inside a drilled hole nicely. Its not quite the same thread pitch/type/size as the small bag of metal bogie holding screws that I've used forever (seriously, they need a straight screwdriver bit if anyone can remember those). But the tap will gently and efficiently remove enough material that the screws seem to find a home reasonably well. I must find a handle for it rather than using pliers. Perhaps it would fit into the handheld pin vice thing I use for small drills. So if you have this issue too, you might consider going to one of the local engineering firms with one of your screws and get the right sized tap. They aren't terribly expensive and will last a lifetime of making 3D bogie wagons up.

Its a cute wagon. Something quite different in a train that's for sure. Highly recommended.

The southern branch of MD will be away over the hills for the next week doing research in the field.  

Greymouth 3 - Rapido Progresso.

 DB speaking fluent Italian there:

Its been a belissimo week here, but the dungeon has been visited on a few cloudy days such as today. These visits have produced surprising progress. 

As the old saying goes, "If you spent as much time doing it, as you do thinking about it..." Well for once I've just gotten stuck in.

The first task involved getting that third road out from the platform and its attendant siding installed. This required modifying two old points to be fed at the frogs by a switch using methods described earlier. This didn't take as long as I remember, and the points went in quickly, with their point throw rods under the layout. This meant I could fix down the '4th access road' at Elmer Lane to the PCB at the edge of that module. 

Rails was quickly painted brown with a rail pen, and the sleepers weathered with a light grey wash. The 'modern' coal train was also tried on for size:

I then went mad and soldered up all the jumper wires to the tracks on top. 

Then I went madder and ballasted the whole thing in about 90 minutes, after adding a painted wooden 'platform', which looks a bit skinny. Its 25mm across, and it should be 30, but Greymouth's south end is cut away for car parking anyway. I'll probably double up the width of the north end when the station and attendant buildings go in.

I let that all set overnight. I'll not ballast the PCBs until its all been tested. Which I should have done by now, but that would have distracted me from the roll I was on.

This afternoon, I thought the platform colour was a bit dark (and quite bluey-grey) and was just about to repaint it, when I looked at some pics of the real thing, to see that it is even darker on top (asphalted I guess). So I taped off the edges using Tamiya masking tape guided by my eye, and then painted a darker 'German Grey" on top for the asphalt and leaving the sides and top edges 'concrete'. This came out OK, although probably a bit fancy.

Well. I couldn't stop there, so started building some platform verandahs. Greymouth has quite long ones at both ends of its station. I took an educated guess based on the space available and some other station and verandah plans as a guide to sizes and shapes.

The verandah poles were hastily added from H section styrene. These will not meet any textbook definition of 'vertical' so were painted dark grey to hide them. Two poles on each 30cm 'end' have steel spikes, which plug into holes on the platform.

The station has worn many paint schemes over the years. In the 1950s or 60s it looked almost orangey/bricky with white trim. The wood was repainted in a lightish green with white trim and a red roof in the mid 1960s for the very end of steam. The red roof was a patchwork of red and new silver corrugated roofing in the mid-70s and the station was light grey.

In the AC cars era, it was a fairly bright yellow, with white trim and a green roof. This yellow faded a bit over the years. In the dark blue TranzAlpine days and for the 1988 flood, the station was a light grey with dark red trim. 

The last train to use the wharf trackage left Riverside behind three blue DJs at the end of July 1989, although the station building was removed before the 88 flood (probably removed when the Rewanui passenger trains ended in October 1984). Only three tracks remained by the station by 1992, and the Warehouse was in place in the yard when the footbridge was removed in 2002 or 2003 

The station today is a cream colour with red trim.

Mine will be the light grey with bricky trim grey roof for something vague and subtle. 

Station to go in between:

A bit of History

 (Not the right scale but...)

Last weeks monthly modeling meeting threw up an interesting find. One of the group had purchased a loco from an estate sale and brought it along. 

An interesting ancient scratchbuilt beast with Romford 15 spoke wheels and a Hornby XT60 motor (not even an X04). A closer inspection revealed that this was a spectacularly nice scratchbuild built by a precise hand. However a few ergs revealed that it was not in the best of health, though it did move. It's providence was discused at length until someone remembered that Paul Bernsen had made a small batch of F's in the late 60's. This tallied with the workmanship and apparent age of the model. 

A bit of oil and the spritely 60 year old was happily growling up and down the track.

Shear bloody magic.

Greymouth 2 - Moduleing on

DB in another West Coast land grab. 

I don't remember where I left the Greymouth piece off, but some legs have been built with long 'bottoms' to be trimmed later...

...and the top was primed, and some basic track surface (thin basswood sheet from Mitre 10) added in a few key spots:

Next up from the Master Plan...

...we need the intermediate module that will host the Grey station and the yard tracks. This has been pondered for some time, but should be fairly quick to make. 

I have no idea where it came from, but I have a long piece of fairly thin ply about 39cm wide, so cut some fresh 18mm stuff into sections the same width wide to bolster that top sheet with:

And then some sides from Bunnings were added:

And there it is resting on the garage floor, as always, in the hope it will set flat. This only took about half an hour to make once the first cut was made, and this won't need any legs, because Elmer Lane and the Yard Throat/Riverside modules are plenty pedal.

Indeed, this has continued to come together super quickly. It was primed, and blacked up on top with some 99 cent shop paint.

It then came inside and was clamped onto Elmer Lane so holes for dowels and a bolt/wingnut could be made while the faces were mated together. Then today I decided to cut out some copper PCB strips for soldering the rails to at the ends.

The tracks started to reach out for the other end, so PCB was cut and attached there too. And before you know it, five of the six tracks are ready for soldering to the PCB and wiring up. 

Once I've used a Dremel to cut the rails strung between this module and Elmer Lane, the awkward 'new' turnout into Elmer Lane can be laid, along with the third road out from the platform. This is just sitting there at the moment. The platform will be located on the far side in the pic above, or on the right in the one below.

This is basically the access track for the loco depot, which is a bit silly, but that's the way things had to be, given that the extended south end of the station extends well beyond the Elmer Lane throat which has marched north.

I was going to put a small passing loop on that third track, perhaps for storing the Rewanui passenger train, but given the price of PECO points these days, I'll just make it a siding with the turnout at the Grey River end as shown here. A dead-end siding will be more capacious too, so it could also fit a 1990s TranzAlpine or a little work train.

As you might just be able to make out in the above pic, I've finally gotten a look at what a good-length train will look like on this. The coal train above is 32 wagons incl guards van, plus 2 locos, and over 2.2m long. The three rear yard tracks might fit 2.5m trains. 

But whether such trains can be dragged around the Roundhouse loop is another matter! Soon we shall see.