A Quick Project

We have some toy boxes filled with cars and trucks that belonged to our sons when they were young. They are now used by our grandchildren when they visit us. Rooting through one of these I came across a Lima 00 gauge railway wagon.

It looked decent with finely detailed bodywork and pinpoint axles. Even the inside (which is never normally seen) had detailed floor planking. However, some aspects of its design clearly showed that it was meant for play by young children rather than an accurate model of the prototype for a model railway.

The giveaways are the McCain logo (never used on real wagons), blocky buffers, roof clips that are meant to be ventilators but do not have the slope of the prototype, one piece body and chassis moulding, missing faux coupling hook, no vacuum pipes nor vacuum cylinder, no tie-bar between axle boxes, brake blocks that don't line up with the wheels and it is feather light (not weighted).

Despite these shortcomings the body detail and pinpoint axles encouraged me to turn it into a more prototypical wagon for my layout. I decided to have a look at prototype wagons to see how closely it matched. On Paul Bartlett's website I came across identical bodywork for vans designed to Diagram 1/208!

I then researched to find out more about this 'toy' and came across Lima model 305687W. But whilst having identical body style and logo it has a black chassis sporting prototypical buffer stops, and naïve, faux coupling hooks. Clearly not the same model. I found other examples of 'my' model on Ebay but nowhere could I find its history. I am guessing it came from a 'play' train set. I would like to know how it was marketed by Lima so, if you know please leave a comment.

In this photo are examples of the new components to be added to the wagon. Coupling and vacuum pipe are from my spares box. The grey components are designed and resin 3D printed by myself. 

The rectangular piece is the sloping ventilator that will be glued to the flat ventilator/roof clip. Once the roof is fitted and sloping ventilator glued in place then it will (sadly) not be possible to remove the roof from the wagon.

The yellow wagon in this photo has had the logo scratched away, the blocky buffers cut off, the 'D' coupling removed, missing tie bars installed (plasticard) and a steel weight fixed inside.

I intended to buy bauxite coloured paint for the body but not finding the Humbrol satin acrylic I wanted locally I decided to mix my own colour from dark brown, light brown and red acrylic paints that I had to hand. The match came out satisfactorily using another wagon as a paint guide.

Recommended bauxite paints:

Humbrol 133 (satin acrylic)

Tamiya XF-68 (matte acrylic)
Railmatch 2235 (matte enamel)

Revell 85 (matte acrylic)

Handling of the finished wagon has started to rub away the paint in places to reveal the grey primer beneath. I might touch it up and and apply a matte varnish to seal the paint.

The decals are designed in photoshop with a 300 pixels per inch setting and printed on copier paper. The high p/in minimises bleed of the brown background into the white text during printing. 

The wagon number is DB755181, as per a wagon from Bartlett's gallery. The 'D' possibly indicates this general purpose wagon was later allocated to departmental stock.

End.