Military manoeuvres...

I've been working on a pair of more 'modern' wagons than usual - a mid 1980s MOD train is being assembled, and these two distinctive short wheelbase vehicles will be perfect... 

The bookazine 'The Changing Face of Railfreight' on Pocketmags provided the inspiration, a good read during lock down if you like modern image wagons. The VEA and ODA were BR's answer to the problem of the new rail freight vans being too long for some of the track work at some military and explosive depots. Short wheelbase wagons were rebuilt to allow running in the speed link network at higher speed. So how to approach the prototype? both examples can be fabricated using Parkside kits. The VEA is a straight forward build of the kit, as intended, although I have cut off and replaced the door handles with 0.4mm brass wire (although the holes in the van door are a little oversize, not obvious until the handles were painted white!). This is fitted with Accurascale buffers and Smiths couplings - it awaits an airbrake pipe hanging from the buffer beams.

The second was slightly more involved. The ex LNER BR 20t pipe wagons were rebuilt in the same way that the van wides (ex VWV) were, fitted with FAT-19 suspension. I started with a Parkside kit for the original wagon, and then a chassis only kit for the FAT-19. I cut the W-irons off the chassis of both, and glued the FAT-19 onto the tube wagon chassis. These needed no re-inforcement, the Parkside kits chassis responds well to glue.

The wagons are painted in grey and red, mixed slightly differently to show some variation, the prototypes often seemed to weather and fade different and I will add weathering over the top of this clean finish. The transfers are from Rail-tec. They're really neatly printed but I've found them difficult to use. They won't like Micro-set and Micro-sol, it lifts them rather than sinking them over detail, and despite several attempts I can't get the Railfreight ones any better than seen here (slight silvering on the van, and no crease where the plank is on the ODA) and this is applied over a gloss finish from a clear lacquer spray. I chose them because they did a set specifically for the VEA. I'm not sure I'd recommend others to use them - in future I'd probable assemble something suitable from Fox sheets, or use my own custom designed transfers. The ODA's data panel is a slightly and badly altered one from the VEA, this will be less obvious once weathered.

A good fun project, and nice to try out a different product (the Rail-tec transfers), which helps inform me for future models and commissions. If you'd like something similar I can happily give you a proposal, drop me a message through Facebook, the contact page on my blog or the forums. More soon...