Brassed Off - back to those IAs

DB returns to the MMW IA wagons...

Its been many months, well years actually, but I've finally finished one of these. 

You may remember that in July I soldered a decks to an underframe quite unsuccessfully with a notable gap between the two pieces. 

Some of this is probably due to my own incompetence with folding and soldering, but even on the second wagon, being super careful, I was unable to fold these without leaving a gap. The following attempts to explain this. 

So what I decided to do in the end was to separate the side sills with their twistlock detail from the main structural beams with the nice etched hexagonal holes. 

I tried soldering the main beams of the second IA onto its deck with a slightly better, but still imperfect result. The side sills were glued to the top deck with some plastic chunks where needed to ensure things were well stuck at 90 degrees. 

After some attempts to make the bogie mounting platforms smaller (see above) to clear the wheels, I ditched the ends of the main beams, just keeping the centres with the etched holes. My bogie mounting bolsters are plastic like with my other container wagons

That all sounds a bit hokey, but it looks acceptable. 

I decided I wanted these IAs up front behind the loco, because they are the best detailed of my container wagons with their see-through beams and decking. The plan was to put tanktainers on them, so you could see through the tanktainer and the deck to the beams. But then I remembered why I'm building these in the first place - I want tall containers to sit behind the tall DM (or DLs if on tour) but alas tanktainers are the same height as little old 20 foot containers. 

So I decided to place one curtainsider on the end of this wagon beside the loco (alas this container will hide the wagon detail) and have the second slot empty (which will show some details as a consolation prize). The other IA may become a tanktainer carrier later on.

In the above picture I have some of that key steel weight between the beams. This is just under the end that will have the container and main deck, so will not be that visible, especially as the sides of it are painted black. 

This will also be a transition coupler car, with a Microtrains at the loco end, and an old school Peco/Rapido one at the other end, as the Kato bogies I am using have these. Bogies added:

The bogie at the left/loco/handbrake end is fixed with a long bolt sticking through a hole in the brass deck, the other end has a bolt that was truncated using a Dremel, into a nut glued to the deck underside

Nearing completion, with container and coupler added.

In the background are the latest experiments, being IL wagons. More to report in the next exciting episode. 

An interesting Podcast

 I've been listening to some US podcasts, and this episode is quite interesting and I thought I would share it. An interesting dsicussion on Model railways and mental health.

Just what I have been looking for.

 For a few years now, I've been looking at using servos on a layout. however mostly this involves some sort of computer programming and being a bit of a luddite I neer really progressed this. To me, digital mostly means using a finger. about a month ago I was looking for something else on Ali Express and came across this.

A single servo driver with a simple push button. The tiny screw on the top is used to set the travel.

From the bottom. The solder joint between the 2 pads close to the "1" means that the push button must be held down to get the servo to travel, and when released it returns to the zero position. breaking this solder connection and conecting the pads near "2" means that the unit "latches" ie push to move and push again to return. The unit can also be triggered by connecting 5 ergs (or volts) to the blob of solder on the right hand side, which is means that its easy to set up a remote push button switch. Wiring is easy. 5V in and plug the servo lead the right way round. You can't control the speed but thats not a deal breaker.

I have been looking for something like this to operate old semophore signals for another project. And with some MDF and wire I managed to make it work. 

Stop

Go

The potential for this is obvious to move all sorts of things, including points. Oh and they are dead cheap, mine were $6 each on my doorstep. The servos are also not hideously expensive, and surprisingly strong. I'm now planning to look at using them for point throws.

Oh and heres avideo with much more information on the ins and outs. Servo driver on the cheap.

IH Wagons in Styrene

DB continues along his merry trek...

One of the reasons I didn't make three IA wagons, is that I wanted a little variety, especially as the IA wagons are now well outnumbered down here by newer versions like the IH/IK and IL. So here is an IH. Or two.

The IH was built approx 2013-15 and includes a few features that make the newer generation of wagon classes quite different from the older IA/HK: 

• They have no 'extended end platform' with its raised handbrake on a stick. 
• They don't have a continuous side sill like the IA/HK/UK/PK, but instead have end platforms and protruding ribs in the middle to support twistlocks for the 'shorter' containers. 
• These IH (and the very similar IK) end platforms have a little central hump above the bogies when viewed from the sides. 
• They have side-mounted hand brake wheels.
• While older container flat wagons, dating back to the UK,  had their twistlocks mounted outside the side sill on a thin-bodied wagon, whereas the tops of these wagons are wider (the same width as a container), with integrated removable twistlock pockets set into the top deck.

Note the raised 'hump' on the end platform

Without the long side sills, building these will take a different tack, whereby the central rib pieces will be merely for looks, and not at all structural on the model. These were made up from some styrene shapes, as seen  below. I later replaced the central skinny square rod with some half-round at an angle to represent the central section of deck, as I figured the rods might be too fragile, hard to get lined up nice and straight, and hard to see under the containers anyway. The twistlocks are little rectangles of .015x.040 strip. Riblets:

The end platforms below were made from the same chunky rectangular styrene rod, with a thin .020 deck section between to give plenty of clearance for wheels and couplers. Oddly, these platforms have different lengths - one end of the wagon having an extra inner twistlock for some reason. 

These had bogie bolsters drilled out to take M3 bolts like the IAs, and similar Rapido coupler arrangements were effected (with one end of the wagon having a 'long' detached coupler, and the other one attached to the bogie that sits under the deck - see the IA blog entries to explain why!)

On top were glued twistlocks from the .015x.040 styrene strip. The same material was used to create the 'hump' on the platform. This isn't as pronounced as I'd have liked. The real wagons have quite a convoluted top deck shape, but as this will be hidden under containers, I figures the raised hump edges would give enough of an implication of this shapeliness. 

As can be seen above the platform ends (and the central riblets) were painted weathered black before assembly, as its always harder to paint all the fiddly bits later on. 

I had to add some additional sections of internal 'floor' inside the containers to glue the platforms to, and for later mounting of a spine rod.

It was then a simple task to line two of these containers up (one of each length!) and gluing down a 4x4mm piece of 'key stock steel' as a spine on top to join the two halves together and this also adds a little low-down weight:

You can see the coupling arrangements (one protruding, one inset) clearly in the picture above. 

Then the decorative centre side riblet pieces that were made in step 1 were attached:

Underframe sections were cut out (these are fairly plain on the prototype):

And installed. Slopey braces were fitted, along with a few underframe details, such as air tanks and cylinders. I 'painted' the inner surfaces of the sloped braces and the main underframe sides black with a sharpie pen before installing the braces, as its notoriously hard to get a paintbrush in there afterwards. 

A slightly trickier build than the IA, and done in spurts of a few hours over a couple of days, but they came out OK I reckon. 

I painted the sides a weathered brown to make the sill shapes and underframe detail pop a little. 

The IHs then had some some N scale handbrake wheels donated, reflective strip decals added, and I attempted to paint the twistlocks light grey. One of these days we will do some decals. On these newer wagons the lettering is yellow and applied to the black frame, whereas the IAs still have black class letters and numbers on a yellow patch.  

Ah, that looks better:

Plastic fantastic IA wagons

DB still needed some 'modern' flat wagons to go under his fancy new containers. 

Yes, I do need to get back to those brass IAs, but before I overcome that mental hurdle, maybe there is an easier way for now.  Three-foot-six models have some decent looking IAs that are 3d-printed in metal, but are $50 a pop and I usually have to do a fair bit of dremelling to them to make my chosen bogies and couplers fit.

The nicely detailed 3D printed ones, along with the MMW IAs, and the 3D printed 'open' UKs, also look at their skeletal best when empty, or carrying something see-through like a pair of tanktainers. 

To carry my long (prototype 7600mm) long GSH containers, it almost seems a waste to hide all that fancy etched or printed underframe detail and open decking under containers.

So maybe some cheap and nasty IAs could be made up from styrene, modelled off the MMW one?

.080x.080 rodding looked right for the chunky side sills that the HK/IA wagons have, with 14mm wide sections of thin sheet to hold them apart. My builds here are slightly skeletonised in their construction to give plenty of room for swivelling couplers and wheels. The bits that are open will be covered by the containers anyway.

I'm using Japanese 'Taki' bogies that are occasionally produced by Kato. I found these available as 'spare parts' several years ago on HobbySearch, but they are a short run item that was out of stock. I clicked on 'notify me when available' and forgot about them. Last year, I received an email saying they were suddenly orderable again, so I signed up for ten pairs. 

They are a bit larger than Microtrains (Japan usually models in 1:150 rather than the Americans with their 1:160), with larger metal wheels. If you get your monocle out, you'll see they have leaf springs  rather than coils, but the main downside is they have old school Rapido couplers on shortish shanks. 

As the IA has a handbrake platform at one end that protrudes out a way from the bogie mounting point, I decided to cut a coupler off the bogie and mount it onto this extension. As such, the coupler 'sticks out' from the wagon end like dog's roundels.

At the other end, an as-delivered bogie plus coupler would be mounted at the prototypical bogie pivot location, so its shorty coupler would be almost entirely under the wagon. But coupling two wagons with this arrangement (one short coupler and one protruding) would provide a good coupling distance between them. Obviously this means these wagons, plus any more that I make with these bogies, will be operated as a fairly fixed modern intermodal consist, with a microtrains coupler at each end of the rake.

Twistlocks were 'inferred' from .040x.040 rod. 

Underneath the wagon is a 4x4mm piece of 'key stock steel' from the local engineering shop as a spine to provide stiffness and a little weight. 

An ornate coupler box has also been constructed for the sticky-out handbrake end, and the wagon was then crudely painted, and holed for a M3 bolt and nut.

And with containers placed on top, these will look the part from the mandated viewing distance.

A final touch was adding some underframe detail, although this is barely visible beneath the deep IA side sills. 

There seem to be two versions of the IA, the ones modelled in the MMW kit (and in the prototype pic at the top of this) have a zillion smaller holes in the underframe beams, and the other style has 11 larger holes. As I happened to have a plan of the latter, I made this up after 'painting in the holes' black in photoshop and printed it out on the laser printer. Then a wash of brown was applied so the black 'holes' still show through. Hard to see on the finished picture. 

I believe the prototype only has an air tank on one side, but I ended up putting one on each side. 

Overall, these two styrene IAs were not difficult to build other than the coupler boxes. They probably took two hours to do each (four for the pair), but on the plus side, a wagon costs less than $5 in styrene and steel. 

Bolts/bogies and couplers are extra, but would also have to be provided if I'd purchased a 3D printed wagon frame. And had I bought one of those, I'd still have spent more than half an hour modifying it to take my bogies and couplers anyway.

And they were fun to make. It was a good idea to build two wagons at once, as the time to cut out another set of bits once the pondering was done was minimal. I probably should have made three!

Still needs some decals, some paint detailing, and handbrake stands applied. Fortunately some of the IAs have 'plain' lever handbrakes mounted above the deck (see the prototype pic at the top here). 

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:

Searching for some Mojo via some brass IA wagons

DB returns.

It's been a while since I last allowed my poor typing skills to wander over these increasingly fallow blogfields, and although I am occasionally accused of bouncing between scales and prototypes, I haven't really done any modelling for six months or more. Every attempt to do something in NZ120 until recently has run into a demoralising buffer stop.

Case in point:

It occurred to me that I didn't have anything 'prototypical' to tow behind the Stadler DM at the Christchurch show last October, so it was fortunate indeed that Aaron Wall had a hicube container on one of his lovely wagons, because the DM is a lot taller than the 'normal' containers on my (now all withdrawn!) UK wagons.

A very long time ago, I purchased a pair of Mark's Model Works IA etches. So why not build these up to give me a pair of modern wagons?

Well, one of the reasons they have sat untouched for a dozen years or more include my aversion to soldering. The etches themselves are also quite complex-looking. The instructions are similarly scary at first, although are relatively straightforward after reading them a dozen times and finally getting my head round the basic processes.

OK, the IAs might be a quick win, so why not give them a crack?!

It turns out that when you cut the IA kit off the 'sprue', all that visible complexity is distilled into only two pieces: a straightforward deck, and the underframe. At first glance the latter looks like a squashed 20-legged brass tarantula, but, as long as you read the instructions properly, it all folds up very neatly within a few minutes to the accompaniment of a few "well, that's incredibly well designed" mutterings. 

The two pieces then clamp together very nicely under their own steam but it is suggested that you drop a little solder between the deck and underframe in the middle of the wagon to hold everything in place permanently. 

Of course that's when things went off the rails. 

I got my first bit of solder to stick almost immediately, but over the next fifteen minutes, I couldn't get any more solder to attach itself to the underside of the deck, despite pouring flux all over everything (including my jeans) and nearly melting the now-discoloured etches under a sustained carpet bombing of intense heat delivered by my soldering cannon. 

The solder stuck as expected to the folded underframe piece but blobbed up when meeting the under-deck and wouldn't stick to it with any consistency.

I was then left with a real mess. The over-heated deck warped away from the underframe, the solder blobbed between these growing gaps and cooled, making things worse. 

The deck and frame are now stuck 'apart' rather than 'together' and I didn't know whether to go back and risk applying more heat and compression to squeeze the two parts together, or just hide the mess under a container.

I headed upstairs, once again disillusioned by failing to complete what should have been a quick and easy task. Modelling seemed so much easier 40 years ago when it was just plastic, balsawood, a knife and some glue. All of which were easy to understand and control back when I had functioning close-up eyesight and I didn't drink far-too-much-coffee. 

A few months later I returned downstairs, to attempt the second wagon. 

Some lessons that had been learned: 

• The semi-industrial bottle of flux I have been using for some time lists a few metals that it is formulated for on the bottle.... but not brass. 
• I should have lightly sanded the mating surfaces first and would try tinning the deck first next time before mating the deck and frame. 
• I held the deck to the frame with wooden pegs, but could have used stronger clamps or pliers (it is indeed a recurring design deficiency that modellers are not born with three hands)
• The etch (or my folding process) results in some inevitable gapping between the side sills and the deck. This could be mitigated somewhat with a file.

That all happened a few months ago, and I have since resolved these (my) issues and built the two wagons, but for now, let us make a slight detour, as I want to construct some containers to go on them.

Hold this thought though, as we will return to the two brass IAs in a week or three.