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Freelance keiben locos and rolling stock in H0e. Warning: contains extensive kitbashing, scratchbuilding and a general inability to open a box of model railway products without turning the contents into something new. Let's start with some existing/completed things. The Blue Beast started out as two of those little blue caricature locos produced by Tomytec that came with a tanker wagon. I had thought that they could be made to look sensible by putting them on bogie chassis instead of the intended four wheelers but that only made them look worse. So I grafted the two bodies together and mounted them on a Kato EF65 chassis with the middle bogie taken out. The whole fiction is vaguely justified by the similar looking locos used by the Nagaden for heavy freight traffic, albeit on 1067mm gauge. A loco of this size, or with double cabs, is admittedly rare on Japanese 762mm gauge. It is a very nice runner though. Generic keiben bogie wagons. These actually use the body from a British 009 plastic kit (War Department field railway D type) mounted on more appropriate bogies. Scratchbuilt ToFu made from all sorts of bits and pieces. Like several of my early freight wagon scratchbuilds, the planks are too small because I had only undersize 1mm or very oversize 2mm planked sheet and did not know of a source of more appropriate 1.5mm planked sheet (subsequently found from a US supplier). It's inspired by the larger of the two ToFu on the Kusakaru Keiben. I usually have several different items in build at once at various different stages of completion, like this: The coach on the left was built before I acquired a Silhouette cutter for more accurate shaping of plasticard parts and so is rather wobbly compared to later creations. The body parts for the smaller of the two four wheelers in the picture above, fresh off the cutter. Do let me know whether or not this sort of modelling is of interest. It is admittedly rather different from the normal kind of modelling on this forum.

Scenes in the summer of 1985, the twilight of JNR on the Tohoku Main Line, somewhere near Kurihashi Station. Partially airconditioned 115 series units, unremarkable (back then!) 185 series- glory in the roar of their mt54 traction motors, 583 series on long distance services to Aomori, blue trains...later a selection of freight, including a mixed freight, capped by an ef58 pulling a rake of old coaches on a special train. Check out other vids by this user for similar mid-eighties content.

Short video taken in 1986 on the Kure Line in Hiroshima Pref. A lot (most?) of this line is single track, but back in the day it had quite a bit of traffic, including freight and parcels trains. Good scenes of late JNR era railroading. The de10 hauled freight train is eminently modellable.

A week ago Bill posted another video by jitensya37 about Musashino Yard (link below), this one covers now and then aerial images of 31 yards from Goryokaku in Hokkaido to Kumamoto in Kyushu. Hmmm the forum software makes an image out of that list... anywho... It's very interesting how some have been preserved as 'freight terminals' losing only some of their tracks to paved areas for the container and lifts, while others are completely gone.

Hi all, Am lucky enough to be travelling to Tokyo later this month in pursuit of my two hobbies, airplanes and trains. I'm staying a few days near each of Narita and Haneda airports and wondered if anyone had any suggestions of good places within a reasonable distance (preferably by train), to shoot some video of freight trains. Many thanks. Ian

Hello, I have in my collection a wagon type Taki 3000 (black) Kato with white Nisseki Oil logo. ( http://www.katomodels.com/product/nmi/taki3000_e.shtml ) Unfortunately, I can find no information on the web in which period these cars were with this logo on duty !? As far as I know, the wagons were in service throughout Japan, including Hokkaido ?. Can somebody tell me something about that?

http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Nippon-Express-to-offer-weekly-freight-train-service-in-India

Cab view of a container train going across Tokyo to Sumidagawa freight terminal: If someone could identify the exact route, that would be great!

Hachette Japan has released the first issue of a series of magazines that will enable purchasers to build a 725mm X 1278mm freight-themed layout. The length of freight cars and freight trains lends themselves well to having a reasonably proportioned compact tailchaser layout. http://www.kamotsu.jp/home.html