idlemarvel
Neither idle nor a marvel
I have a Saxon NG theme layout and the KD4 4-axle baggage cars are an essential item. You can hardly see a picture of any passenger or goods train on any line that does not start or end with one of these. LGB have new-ish models of them which are very nice but I thought I would try my hand at making one.
I took as a starting point the Newqida green passenger coach, which you can get new for about £30. It has the right sort of balcony roof with curved ends, and the bogie frame is a close match. The body shell needs substantial work of course, and the prototype baggage car is somewhat shorter than the passenger cars, so some length needs to be lost.
Before I start, a word about the Newqida (or Train) coach. It comes in a proper box (orange and brown), the model was all square and ran well over R1 points, being pulled or pushed, and the couplings were at the correct height to work with LGB electric decouplers. The body and roof mouldings were sound, some of the details were a bit flimsy, especially the balcony roof supports, but the single narrow gauge buffers and roof details including Heberlein brake cable pulleys and ventilators were good. Printed numbering was a bit hit and miss, particularly the red colour on the TB logo and no smoking signs, but these were going to be removed with T-cut anyway.
For some reason one side of the seats inside were in green moulded plastic, the other side black, the spring and pivot of the hook coupling was white plastic not black, and the door handles were missing. It all dismantles very easily and most of the large components are screwed together, but I do wonder how the screws would fare outdoors, they look like standard steel to me. So a bit of quality control lacking but overall excellent value for money, especially as you can buy a rake of these for the price of one LGB equivalent.
My plan to “cut and shut” the roof, body and chassis was drawn on a piece of A4 under a scaled picture of the LGB model. I planned to take 90 mm off the length, which would make it a little bit shorter (about 485 mm) than the LGB model, but necessary because of the alignment of the coach windows. I allowed 70 mm for the long sliding baggage doors, so that meant 160 mm off the body. See below:
I used the sides of the section of removed chassis to make the running boards under the baggage doors. I used one side of the body to make fill-ins for the two middle windows and the other I cut into narrow strips for the baggage door top and bottom rails. The base of the body section removed I turned into the wall of the guard’s compartment.
I used 1 mm plasticard to make the baggage doors. I used some wire for the baggage door handles, and found a few balcony door handles in my “box of bits”, otherwise all the material came from the Newqida. I cut out a couple of seats for the guard’s compartment and trimmed the clear plastic windows to allow for the filled-in middle window. I sanded and scored the interior to look like planking, and scribed the outline of a door on the compartment divider. I scored some lines on the side of the body to represent the steel plates the prototype was made from. I thought about adding rivet marks but decided life was too short.
All the cutting was done with a razor saw. I could have done with a longer one to cut the roof as I planned to use a mitre box to ensure the cuts to remove the 90 mm section were square and would match, but the saw was too short to bridge the mitre box. Instead I carefully placed a strip of electrical insulating tape across the roof, as square as I could by eye, then measured 90 mm from that and placed another piece of insulating tape along that line, and cut as carefully as I could along the edges of the insulating tape. Beginner’s luck maybe but this worked very well and you can hardly see the join once it was glued, sanded and painted, and the resulting roof clipped into place just like the original. Newqida have even copied LGB interior coach light mountings so I fitted a couple of those into the roof.
A note about adhesives. The plastics used in these models are notoriously difficult to glue together. I was using mostly epoxy resin (Gorilla brand) but later in the project I discovered this stuff called Ruderer L530 on another thread in this forum. Bit stringy, you have to use it sparingly and it will remove any paint it comes into contact with, but it is very effective and seems to weld the plastic together like polystyrene glue does. It’s not that easy to find, I got my tube on ebay from some supplier in Portugal.
I painted the roof with satin black, interior with some kind of brown and the exterior with RAL 6002 Laubgruen which a German model railway website told me was the closest match to DR green. I have never seen a prototype except in photos so I can’t tell if it is a good match but it looks a bit bright to me. The transfers (decals) are from troeger-2m and they applied very easily. Finished result below:
Real one (well weathered!) for comparison; my model (and the LGB one) look shorter and taller than the prototype. The prototype was <EDIT>11.2 m long which is 500 mm in 1:22.5 scale, the LGB model is 500 mm and mine 485 mm. </EDIT> If you compare the roof with the roof of the carriage on the right you will see the main reason for the height disparity, the roof on the baggage car is very shallow, almost flat, and the wheels on the models are probably too large as well.
This is the kind of train I was aiming to run, a IVK Meyer pulling a baggage car and rollwagen:
If I was doing this again I would re-skin the sides of the coach body with thin plasticard, rather than trying to fill in the window holes, as they look pretty poor; after filling and sanding they looked fine, but painting highlights any cracks large and small. The body is basically a box so it wouldn’t be too hard. It would also make it easier to represent the riveting along the body panel seams, and I could have smaller rectangular windows more like the prototype than the larger rounded passenger windows. Given the comments about the roof line earlier it would be better to replace the whole body and roof, but then we’re in the realm of scratch-building rather than kit-bashing. (I realise the dividing line between these can be rather narrow!) I would replace the balcony poles with wire instead of the plastic ones that come with the Newqida; I might do that anyway. And I’d investigate the green colour a bit more thoroughly.
I took as a starting point the Newqida green passenger coach, which you can get new for about £30. It has the right sort of balcony roof with curved ends, and the bogie frame is a close match. The body shell needs substantial work of course, and the prototype baggage car is somewhat shorter than the passenger cars, so some length needs to be lost.
Before I start, a word about the Newqida (or Train) coach. It comes in a proper box (orange and brown), the model was all square and ran well over R1 points, being pulled or pushed, and the couplings were at the correct height to work with LGB electric decouplers. The body and roof mouldings were sound, some of the details were a bit flimsy, especially the balcony roof supports, but the single narrow gauge buffers and roof details including Heberlein brake cable pulleys and ventilators were good. Printed numbering was a bit hit and miss, particularly the red colour on the TB logo and no smoking signs, but these were going to be removed with T-cut anyway.
For some reason one side of the seats inside were in green moulded plastic, the other side black, the spring and pivot of the hook coupling was white plastic not black, and the door handles were missing. It all dismantles very easily and most of the large components are screwed together, but I do wonder how the screws would fare outdoors, they look like standard steel to me. So a bit of quality control lacking but overall excellent value for money, especially as you can buy a rake of these for the price of one LGB equivalent.
My plan to “cut and shut” the roof, body and chassis was drawn on a piece of A4 under a scaled picture of the LGB model. I planned to take 90 mm off the length, which would make it a little bit shorter (about 485 mm) than the LGB model, but necessary because of the alignment of the coach windows. I allowed 70 mm for the long sliding baggage doors, so that meant 160 mm off the body. See below:
I used the sides of the section of removed chassis to make the running boards under the baggage doors. I used one side of the body to make fill-ins for the two middle windows and the other I cut into narrow strips for the baggage door top and bottom rails. The base of the body section removed I turned into the wall of the guard’s compartment.
I used 1 mm plasticard to make the baggage doors. I used some wire for the baggage door handles, and found a few balcony door handles in my “box of bits”, otherwise all the material came from the Newqida. I cut out a couple of seats for the guard’s compartment and trimmed the clear plastic windows to allow for the filled-in middle window. I sanded and scored the interior to look like planking, and scribed the outline of a door on the compartment divider. I scored some lines on the side of the body to represent the steel plates the prototype was made from. I thought about adding rivet marks but decided life was too short.
All the cutting was done with a razor saw. I could have done with a longer one to cut the roof as I planned to use a mitre box to ensure the cuts to remove the 90 mm section were square and would match, but the saw was too short to bridge the mitre box. Instead I carefully placed a strip of electrical insulating tape across the roof, as square as I could by eye, then measured 90 mm from that and placed another piece of insulating tape along that line, and cut as carefully as I could along the edges of the insulating tape. Beginner’s luck maybe but this worked very well and you can hardly see the join once it was glued, sanded and painted, and the resulting roof clipped into place just like the original. Newqida have even copied LGB interior coach light mountings so I fitted a couple of those into the roof.
A note about adhesives. The plastics used in these models are notoriously difficult to glue together. I was using mostly epoxy resin (Gorilla brand) but later in the project I discovered this stuff called Ruderer L530 on another thread in this forum. Bit stringy, you have to use it sparingly and it will remove any paint it comes into contact with, but it is very effective and seems to weld the plastic together like polystyrene glue does. It’s not that easy to find, I got my tube on ebay from some supplier in Portugal.
I painted the roof with satin black, interior with some kind of brown and the exterior with RAL 6002 Laubgruen which a German model railway website told me was the closest match to DR green. I have never seen a prototype except in photos so I can’t tell if it is a good match but it looks a bit bright to me. The transfers (decals) are from troeger-2m and they applied very easily. Finished result below:
Real one (well weathered!) for comparison; my model (and the LGB one) look shorter and taller than the prototype. The prototype was <EDIT>11.2 m long which is 500 mm in 1:22.5 scale, the LGB model is 500 mm and mine 485 mm. </EDIT> If you compare the roof with the roof of the carriage on the right you will see the main reason for the height disparity, the roof on the baggage car is very shallow, almost flat, and the wheels on the models are probably too large as well.
This is the kind of train I was aiming to run, a IVK Meyer pulling a baggage car and rollwagen:
If I was doing this again I would re-skin the sides of the coach body with thin plasticard, rather than trying to fill in the window holes, as they look pretty poor; after filling and sanding they looked fine, but painting highlights any cracks large and small. The body is basically a box so it wouldn’t be too hard. It would also make it easier to represent the riveting along the body panel seams, and I could have smaller rectangular windows more like the prototype than the larger rounded passenger windows. Given the comments about the roof line earlier it would be better to replace the whole body and roof, but then we’re in the realm of scratch-building rather than kit-bashing. (I realise the dividing line between these can be rather narrow!) I would replace the balcony poles with wire instead of the plastic ones that come with the Newqida; I might do that anyway. And I’d investigate the green colour a bit more thoroughly.
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