Stuck in the Middle with You: finishing off a Trackgang UK

DB says: I try to avoid the spectacularly unusual in my modeling - no Tasman or Kiwi Lager DCs here, or Ravensdown fertilizer wagons that jump out at you every time they circle the track yelling "you just saw me thirty seconds ago, this must be a model!" On the whole, I prefer more mundane rolling stock so you don't notice that I only have one UR wagon, even though it appears on every train you see.

From time to time though, the odd oddity does catch my eye and beg to be modeled. Such was the case with this poor example of wagon utilization seen at Stillwater in 2009:(Now of course in the Beard-era TranzRail days, you'd be surprised to see this many containers on a whole train of container flats, but I digress).

The UK above has a partially open deck and I'd wanted to stick one of my cast shorty GSW containers on an open decked IA to show off the nice laser cut underframe detail, but the only one that I've so far built in far-too-thin styrene isn't really capable of taking a load, and may be consigned to the rubbish bin when some new cuts in the proper thickness arrive from Lower Hutt Phasers in the not too distant future.

So what to do. Unlike Captain Druff'n'Stuff, I like to have just one or two projects actively 'on the go', and hammer through them so I can move on to the next exciting thing. But something that has been hanging around like a bad smell for about six months is this Trackgang UK. I've never been that happy with it, and so it has sat in the corner untouched, like Helen Clark at the Last Woman Left on Earth Dance.

This week I gave up on the IA idea and decided to plop the container on the festering UK instead. So a coat of paint was slapped on, the container added, the location of my randomly attached twistlocks repositioned under it, and suddenly it was starting to look a little better. Adding MicroTrains couplers became a headache as I had to dremel off the cast mounting bits for the included couplers, but with that done it was all plain sailing. Just a quick note on making container wagons look more detailed: I use white paint to represent twistlock handles (run a blob down the left edge of a twistlock if you're right handed) and a yellow blob for the ferry tiedown hooks. I have these cast onto my resin wagons, but an appropriately placed blob on the Trackganger does the trick. I should also add the wee reflectorised rectangles above the bogies as well. These wee touches only take a minute, but make the wagons look quite nice from the other side of a dark smoky room, and now that I see the prototype picture again, I must do the same with the blue container itself. See my previous post on HLCs for more photographic evidence of this targeted paint splattering.Despite my constant moaning about these kits, the see-through look of this from down low does look pretty hawt.