You will be pleased to know it isn't all GWR 4-plank wagons here...
Netherport's imagined location on the Dorset coast is in LSWR territory as much as GWR, so any non-GWR wagons being seen at Netherport are more likely to be LSWR than anything else. Looking at the local geology, it seems the nearest area with clay suitable for brick-making would be to the east of Netherport, and served by the LSWR, so this 3-plank open is bringing bricks for construction work in the town.
The kit is from the old ABS range, much of which is still available from @djparkin. The whitemetal castings are excellent, with some beautifully crisp detail. They also capture well the chunky character of the wooden prototype, with its angled headstock ends doubling as stops for the drop-down sides. As always with these kits, some careful fettling to make sure the main parts go together just right is time well spent:
I used lowmelt solder, only soldering the corners where the headstocks and solebars meet. Because the lowmelt provides a very solid joint, there is no need to solder the ends to the drop-down sides, so these remaining looking like they are separate parts, as they should.
The brake lever and vee-hangers are whitemetal, and inevitably a little thick, so I decided to replace them with etched components. The double vee-hangers come on a fret that allows you to fold them up and assemble them with the cross-shaft, before fitting to the wagon:
I kept the cast brake shoes and push-rods (good decision), and the cast brake lever guard and safety loops (poor decision - I should have replaced them with etched parts):
Round the other side, because the kit allows for either-side, independent brake gear, and I wanted singled-sided for my period, I had to patch up some holes in the solebar with filler. I also replaced the cast horse-hook with wire, relocating it to a slightly different position as seen in photos of the prototype, and added some missing ironmongery with plastikard. I also managed to slightly melt the bottom of one axle-guard, and had to patch that up. The brown paint is acting as a primer where some of this work has been done:
The kit comes with a piece of planked plastic sheet for the floor, which is rather crude, so I replaced it with a new one. Plank grooves were scribed and then the piece was sanded to roughen the surface and give some texture - this really helps when dry-brushing later.
The bricks are by Juweela, available from Model Scenery Supplies. They claim to be 1:48 scale, but are actually pretty accurate for 7mm in length and width, although a bit too thin. However, the colour and texture of the ceramic material are worth the slight dimensional inaccuracy in my opinion.
I first worked out how many I would need, and how they could be laid out to avoid the interior ironwork:
As they come, the bricks are a bit pale and uniform in colour, so I made up some dilute washes of reds and browns, and soaked batches of bricks in different colours. When they dried out, there was a small but definite variation in colour, which improved the effect significantly:
The bricks are glued to a plastikard former that sits in the wagon. This has a shape cut out to give the sense the top layer of bricks is not complete - this is seen in photos of wagons loaded with bricks.
Where the rows needed to be staggered to accommodate the wagon ironwork, packing pieces of plastikard provided an offset, hidden by the upper layer:
The bricks were glued in place by soaking them in dilute PVA. To fit the top layer, I used a piece of brass section as a guide to keep the rows in place while laying out the bricks before gluing:
The interior of the wagon was painted with a couple of basic wood colours in rough coats. The paper held with an elastic band protects the outside paintwork - it's still in grey primer, but the wagon gets quite a lot of handling at this stage, and the primer can get rubbed off the whitemetal quite easily.
Some rough dry brushing in brown and grey provides some variety to the final finish. It looks pretty grim at this stage...
...but it comes together with final dry brushing and washes:
I replaced the whitemetal buffer heads and coupling hooks, and applied lettering with Powsides rub-down transfers (next time I'll get the LSWR evenly spaced!):
And there it is - a few thousand bricks arriving in Netherport. I wonder who it building what?
Nick.
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