Disaster at Battledown #4

To recap, the disaster came about when I was trying to rework the wonky bridge handrails but ended up breaking the bridge (see Part 1). 

The replacement bridge is now in place. It has integrated handrails and whilst these are fixed to every bridge upright and diagonal support to keep it straight there is still a bit of handrail droop between some fixing points.

Whist the Nova3D Mecha water washable resin makes for a more robust model than the Anycubic water washable resin it is just as vulnerable to warping. Hence droopy handrail.

I decided to fit the track to the bridge deck and ballast it before installing the bridge. I thought I had it lined up to the embankment track but at one end the rails were offset by only1mm, enough to derail trains.

I removed the ballast from the joining track and freed it from the track bed ready to reposition and in so doing managed to break the track chairs along one rail.

The sleeper and integrated chairs were resin printed using the brittle Anycubic resin so, I should not be surprised of the failure.

I don't have much Nova3D resin nor Anycubic resin left. Will I have enough to reprint the sleepers?

Featuring BR1 Sleeper Chairs

Next Day

I needed 9 sleeper pairs and found 5 left over from a previous project  so, I had sufficient resin left to print the remaining 4 pairs. 

Existing Anycubic resin prints are shown on the left and Nova3D resin prints on the right. No difference in print quality (photo right). 

The Nova3D printed without deformation and being considerably more pliable than Anycubic the rail chair clips are less likely to fail.

The new section of track duly painted and ballasted (photo left). The rail breaks in the foreground are at baseboard joins to enable baseboards separation, if required in the future.

END

To Part 1.

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.

A Card Kit for July

 Pre-Heritage Swanage Water Tower (L&SWR)

View the Card Kit here.