Flour Power: PFC container recipe

DB says: Another page from the somewhat weighty "I've Always Wanted One Of Those" pile of plans. From poking around magazines and books, it would seem that the PFC containers showed up in the 70s, perhaps in a white or light gray colour. In the early 80s, they were yellow with NZR logos and "Bulk Flour" lettering. I'm told there are a bunch still in use hauling lime to Mission Bush and that they were still running into Huntly with flour up until a couple of years ago. There is a pic of a set at Mission Bush in the DSC article in the June 05 Railfan (J 1212 cover). Its unlikely these things were terribly popular on the Midland Line, but nevertheless, they look pretty tasty to me.

Ingredients
You will need:


...and some bits of styrene.

Method
1. Try to cut those hard little wooden balls in half with a knife. Fail. Check fingers for tell-tale signs of blood loss. 2. Try again with a razor saw. I could have sworn I've seen these for sale made of polystyrene which would have been much easier to cut... 3. Look aghast at the bad cutting job and resolve to do better with second ball. 4. Cut the dowel to length and attach a half-ball to each end with PVA thus:
5. Once the glue has set, apply a liberal amount of modelling putty to seal up the messy joins and sand smooth. 6. Cover liberally with yellow paint. Yikes that looks awful. 7. Apply more putty, sand some more and add another layer of paint. 8. With a bit of trial and error from the Filing and Sanding Department, the angled plates were fettled to fit. Here's one I prepared earlier: That's a drill bit in use on the right as a handle. 9. Now you can go to town with your styrene to build up the ISO container base that supports the tank and attach the random styrene shapes. A few hatches and pipes later, they are starting to take shape...
10. As you can see, I planned to use a brass base to give a decent smattering of weight to the wagon, before I remembered why we don't do that: the thick base means that everything looks like its riding too high once it clears couplers and wheel flanges unless you dremel out the floor like Rhys did for his 47 foot van. Instead I built a wagon up from plastic and weighted it with lead. A trackgang USK would also make an excellent base.

11. Combine ingredients on a low heat.

12. Weather to taste. I overcooked mine a bit

Preparation Time

Longer than you'd think.

Serving Suggestion

Serves one. Contains gluten.

P.S. Some pictures have just arrived of the real thing in lime service at Mission Bush from Michael Harrison. I modelled those prominent wide tank supports - you can see them in the pic with the big strip of brass but they're not clear in my final pic because of the unloading pipe (which is only on one side), but it looks like I should have bought them out a bit further to the edge of the container base. Actually, what I really should have done is to have asked for pictures before I started building... Thanks Michael.