Railway Ballast Cleaning Train - Part 2

This project is turning out to be very fulfilling with periods of  excitement and anticipation as I research, design and build the two ballast cleaning vehicles for this train. So much so that I have been up at 5 am to spend most of the day on the project. There is also periods of frustration, not too many though. It feels a bit like two steps forward and one back, as is often the case in product development.

Not much to show for my efforts in this posting as a lot of the time is spent on research at this stage. Any how, I now have the chassis designed and 3D printed for the cleaning machine. This is the simplest part. I do not have a clue how the design of machine parts used for ballast cleaning will turn out - they are quite complicated.

The two grampus wagons for the train have arrived. I was a bit too hasty in purchasing these. I think I was influenced in seeing that traders stocks appeared quite low so wanted to be sure I got them. In fact, I purchased the last two in stock at Hattons. I wanted black wagons, being the colour for engineers trains in the 1960s. I did not initially see these for sale so, I opted for the Dapol unpainted variety. Thinking they would be a neutral grey I was pleased to see on arrival that they were already black, which saves on the paint job, although I may apply weathering. They will need appropriate numbers added of course. It was then that I found fully finished black wagons were also available, albeit a few pound more expensive. If I buy transfers for numbering the wagons then the total cost will be about the same!

The wagons come with a ballast load. These are not needed for this train as they were loaded with a variety of objects, including ladder and oil drums. Fortunately, the ballast load is not fixed and was easily removed.

My brake van is an old Airfix kit that I may change for the more detailed R.T.R. model.

To Part 3

To Part 1