This is one of those protracted modelling projects which kept being shoved into a shoe box under the workbench and forgotten about. Although it might be considered a bit outside my normal interests, I've always had a thing about container trains. I think it goes back to a school trip to France in 1979, which involved sailing from Southampton. With seemingly hours to wait before the ferry departed, I remember a view across the docks of a container terminal, and being amazed at the variety of colours, compared to the regulation brown and grey which was all you seemed to get on normal goods trains - at least the ones that went past our school. Ever since then I've been smitten with container trains, regarding them as far more interesting than the usual run-of-the-mill modern freight consists.

I wanted a "1970s" container train, therefore, and decided to take the route of using the S-kits detailing pack to convert a rake of the basic Triang-Hornby container flats. This is very much impressionistic modelling as the kit has to live with the fact that the Hornby wagons have solid frames, rather than the open, skeletal look of the prototype. But as far as I'm aware the only other route to these wagons was an expensive and complex kit designed for P4 modellers, so I took the pragmatic route. It's the containers that'll catch the eye, not the underframe - at least, that's the theory. The S-kits package includes parts to do five wagons, so a complete FFA/FGA rake, and I bought two packs since I intended to do nine or ten vehicles in total, depending on the length of my storage loops. A start was made, wheels bought, bearings added, bogies converted and lowered on the underframes, and various cast bits added to the flats. And that, I'm afraid to say, was 2007. I then got bored with the tediousness of the conversions and put the lot away until later. As luck would have it, Bachmann then announced that they were doing state-of-the-art versions of these wagons, so that was even less incentive to crack on.

But it's two years since the Bachmann announcement, the wagons aren't anywhere near being in the shops, and in any case my personal modelling philosophy is shifting more to having an imperfect but personal model, than something out of a box which doesn't carry any real personal stamp. The real shove to re-examine this project, though, was a review of Model Rail showing C-Rail's new 1970s-era containers, as well as suitable decals. The authentic containers were always going to be a bit of a stumbling block, but not now!

Last night I got the bits out of the box, assessed what had been done, and spent today completing the first of the rakes, barring fine detail such as brake wheels. Getting these to track reliably is a challenge, but after a lot of patient fiddling I got there in the end, and they should only be more sure-footed once the containers are added. They look good whizzing around, anyway.

Cheers and thanks for reading.