Latest project

[Wirelizard]

 

[Wirelizard]

Progress on the "latest project":



The train is a toy train my brother found at a local thrift shop. I snagged the gondola car, discovered the gondola body would pop off the chassis with a bit of gentle flexing, and have proceeded to build a protected flatcar on top.

I can't really called it "armoured", as it's rail ties and sandbags, but it's better than setting up a machinegun on a bare flatcar! It's currently sporting Red flags, but the flags pop out and I'll do White flags eventually, for the inevitable changes of ownership. It's not based on any single historic prototype - I call it "plausible" rather than "historical". Lots of different railcars found themselves adapted to war in lots of different ways, so a wood-and-sandbag bunker was almost certainly tried somewhere during the RCW!

My brother is repainting the engine, and the whole assembly will star in a game I'm running at Vancouver's Trumpeter Salute wargame show this coming weekend. I'm happy with the front end, but less so with the back end. It looks kind of unfinished now, but I've run out of time. I might yet slice the curved roof off, run sandbags all the way down the side, and leave the whole thing open-topped. We shall see.

In the meantime, it'll be carrying a Bolshie machinegun detachment into battle with the hated Whites at Trumpeter!

[former user]

that's a cool build

how wide is the track, for curiosity?

[Turbo-Ben]

Very cool!
I really like it! How did you make the sandbags? I will have to add some to one or two of my flatcars as well.


I think its the same train toys'r'us sells at the moment (our new trains look similar).
It uses the same tracks as my older trains.


 

[Wirelizard]

I'd carefully packed the traincar away for transport to this weekend's gaming convention just after posting this photo, so now of course I can't immediately tell you how wide the track is. About 1.5" or so?

The sandbags are just Milliput; roll out snakes of putty, cut with an old steel base and apply singly, or lay the snakes down and then form them into sandbags in place. The wood pieces are all roughly the same size as the ties on the plastic track we're using, and the flags come out so I can eventually make and paint White Russian flags too, for the inevitable changes of ownership.

[former user]

this must be 3.75 cm...
this is rather wide....
no typical gauge - can't say anything about the scale....

[doowopapocalypse]

Awesome conversion, reminds me of some of the cars in Corto Maltese in Siberia.