Trackside CB Coal Wagons

See? Bees! (groan)

I bit the bullet and built up the remaining seven Trackside CBs last week, assembling them with the bolster-in-the-right-place mod per the CF, and then I stared at them for a while. They look good, but they don’t look right. Like they’re perched up high, sitting on high heels. So I compared the models to a CB plan. Aha.

A thin strip of plasticard was added under the CB bodysides to make the things look like they sit lower. The three way-too-short bomb-bay doors were extracted (I should have been a dentist) and replaced with ones longer in the fore-aft direction. Ahhhh, now that’s more like it. Because the Trackside bolsters are so far inboard to clear the couplers, there was only room left for shorty discharge doors in the kit. When I moved my homemade bolsters out to where they should be, a large gap was left, now plugged by proper length doors. I wasn’t going to make 21 of these painful wee doors, so I made a mold to do a wagon in one pop. If anyone else out there has CBs that you want to re-bolster and would like some door castings, let me know. Interestingly, the 21 metal door castings off the seven wagons weighs more than a complete wagon...

Hungry boards were made up from styrene strips to represent current practice and the CBs were starting to look pretty good. I made three variations of CB ends, four as the kits were intended('phase 1' CBs?), two as ‘phase 3’ CBs with the CF style raised bridge walkways, and one CB that is missing its angled shelter completely at one end and has a skeletonal one at the other – both variations that exist in the real world. Take the red pill, Neo. CB modifications - compare the CF nethers (top left) with the CBs below. Decals to come.

Despite my recent Grafar bogie thrillride, Microtrains were used here. I have a bunch of them in inventory so they're 'free', they run well (important under these heavy fellows), and hey, it's a black snakey coal train. Nobody will be looking at the bogies too closely. They won't be allowed.

I discovered a nifty trick for painting these quite by accident. If you take enamel flat medium gray Testors paint and mix it with Model Master acrylic flat black (thinking it was enamel), the enamel and acrylic doesn’t blend perfectly, but as long as you keep stirring the concoction with your brush, you end up with a really cool dark-gray 'metallic-look' finish. Quite the shiznit, as Snoop Dog would say if he was an NZ120 modeler.