AO 10 - TranzUnders

DB prattles on:

Back in 2010-13 I made four TranzAlpine AO big window cars (scroll down this ten years and you will find how they were made).

But I never got around to finishing off the underframes. I've pondered this for a long time. Being solid resin, the cars are heavy, derailments are inevitable, so their truss rods can't be too fragile.

Some time ago I purchased some square brass rod from Russell at Trackgang thinking that might be a piece in the puzzle. In the end the solution ended up being the usual blend of realism vs pragmatism.

To add strength, the vertical supports are solid across the car, being solid rectangles of styrene, with small notches in the corners for the truss rods, and larger ones for the existing underframe sills.

Then it was simply a case of folding the brass rod into the right shape, filing an angle in the ends and glueing it on straight.

The it was time for some underdetails. Of course who can remember what they are! Fortunately there is a nice picture on this blog showing what are probably water and toilet retention tanks on one side.

Some leftover slightly oversize wooden dowels from the dollar store were used for those. 

It took some digging around the hard drive to find some pictures of the other side. Most cars had what I assume is an air conditioning radiator and a few boxes on that side:

On the prototype trains, viewing car AG 90 was in the 'middle' of the train, and it looks like the cars 'west' of it all had the tanks on one side (north) and on the east end of the train, the cars were the other way around, with the radiator sides facing north. Here are some pics of both sides of the model:

My 'radiators' are radiator inserts from dash-8 shells cut down the middle and trimmed slightly (ex my DXCs).

And a splash of paint later: 

Not bad for an evening's work. A little weathering and touch ups to the windows and the blue might come next. Maybe more.