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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.

IMHO, some of the best railway modelling being done in Japan is by the members of the Keiben Modelling Group, who hold an exhibition in Tokyo every year. The scale is 1/87, but the track used is n scale, to simulate the 762mm narrow gauge. Video of the latest gathering a couple months back- I especially like the module setup from 1:49 to 4:35. My absolute favorite from several years back, this has been posted elsewhere in this forum, but it's worth a repost. More along the lines of a "heavy" electric railway than a keiben line, if it wasn't for the 9mm track. Just stunning: What makes these layouts successful (IMO)? A focus on the railway itself, the rolling stock and the infrastructure, and the immediate scenery. Weathering, but not too over the top to make it "Tooonervillesque" a la Malcolm Furlow. Focusing on the mundane and everyday, but making it realistic, rather than trying to recreate the unusual, improbable, or spectacular.