Fancy curtainside GSH containers

As DB noted, that now the UK container wagons have left revenue service, he lacks anything 'prototypical' to tow behind the DM. 

He had wanted to build a few of these striking modern curtainsiders for the Christchurch show last year, but couldn't get around to making them in time.  

Read on, dear listeners, for in this exciting episode, all those dreams will come true (dramatic chord)...

Righto, firstly the hard bit. In Photoshop I made up a grid of rectangular masks the right size, and then scaled and perspective-corrected a bunch of photos on layers underneath each 'hole' to fit. Thanks to Southern Rails' Mike H, David O, myself, KiwiRail, the container manufacturers and a few others I may have not mentioned here.

Regardless of the process, his resulted in the following fairly reasonable sheet, which I had printed out on some glossy sticky stuff at the local printers: 

This picture above has probably been resized by the blog software, but you can contact me if you want a full sized TIF file to print out. 

And now the easy bit. The real containers taper very (very) slightly towards the top when viewed end on, but this is so subtle I wouldn't be able to replicate it with any degree of accuracy or consistency, so mine are 'intended' to be vertical.

The basic faces of the containers were made from Evergreen styrene. 

• The sides are thick-ish 1mm (.040") plain sheet cut into rectangles 24mm tall x 61mm long. 
• The ribbed roof is 61mm long x 19mm wide, nestled between the sides to give a container 21mm wide.
• The ends are 24mm tall x 21mm (over-)wide. These were made from chunkier corrugated stuff.

One side and roof were stuck together, and then an end was capped on to keep things square. Then the other side, and finally the other end cap. 

Despite measuring carefully, using a magnifying visor and marking out with a fine blade, I have close to zero ability to produce multiple pieces of exactly the same size, no matter how hard I try. Nor to make a 90-degree line. In reality, some of these turned out slightly trapezoidal when viewed end-on, and a couple almost rhomboid in nature. The worst were re-glued into something bordering on rectangles with 90 degree corners.

Fortunately, this construction approach provides multiple ways of 'covering' the inaccuracies, especially making the ends slightly over-width for later trimming. Cutting out multiple 'end', 'side' and 'roof' pieces in bulk allows you to trim or discard any outliers, and once assembled, any bits that are a bit too large can be trimmed up to suit.

For added fanciness,  I applied .010x.080 strip to the ends of the roof, which provided a little detail and covered any gaps that remained from my assembly of the basic box. Again, these were initially chopped into slightly-over-long-lengths and trimmed to match once they were glued down.

Some little .020x.020x.010 squares faked up the twistlock pocket castings on top for a little added detail. More .010x.080 strip was added to the ends. These GSHs are considerably larger than the 'standard' (non hi-cube) 20-foot boxes I'm used to working with in NZ120!

And then there were five. Painted dark grey and stickered up:

Oooo. Cute. 

And since its quite quick to cut out and assemble the pieces in bulk, why not make a few more:

Ten up: