Tea Break

Am_Fet Ponders:

And so planning continues afoot for the rolling stock needed to populate the 1940's rural idyll that is The Forks. After pondering on the plethora of highsiders needed, attention soon turned to the box wagons. Now, my wishlist was for a couple of Xa's and a K or two, but I got seduced slightly by memories of a 1:64th Z wagon we had as kids, to which I have recently located a plan:


And luckily, there is one up the road in Silverstream waiting to be crawled over with a camera....


So one of those is a must, and the 2mm bogies that the Blogmaster has assembled fit the "Type 97" bill quite nicely. Thoughts then turned back to the 4 wheelers. By pure chance, I found this in a book called "Journey to The Pass":


(Apologies for the photo, it was the easiest way to get a copy.) The photo is from the Aylesbury smash of 1937, and the real interest is the signwriting on the soon to be written off K wagon. It all looks rather "English"...in fact its one of the first times I've seen signwriting on an NZGR Red Oxide van. Uber_Druff managed to find this artifact somewhere on the interweb:


So its time for a bit of guesswork. First thing is the way the wording on the wagon is offset to one side; could it be that the logo was painted on the van side to the left of the door? If you squint at the original, are there a few patches of white that could be the paintwork around the ravens head? How many more wagons were done like this?

Anyway, it will make for a distinctive wagon on the layout. And as Euan McQueen from the Rail Heritage Trust said, "Another fascinating area of research yet to be mined"...I dont know if that was a hint or not!