All things light and narrow

[Beaver]

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.

Edited April 13, 2023 by Beaver

[bill937ca]

Love the Beast and the turnout on the bridge!

 

 

Edited January 7, 2023 by bill937ca

[jappomania]

Voie Libre is the only magazine buying stil "active" for me 😍  except used japanese magazines (the montly shipping cost whitout SAL has become insane...)

 

Ciao!

Massimo

[disturbman]

14 hours ago, Space Beaver said:

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.

Definitely of interest, I wouldn't mind more in depth posts if you can. I don't know if I would myself ever do this, but I find it highly fascinating.

[Beaver]

This was the first carriage I finished.

 

 

There are many things wrong with it. It took a long time to build and had to be reworked several times. It was a learning tool as much as a model. It is not a good model.

 

I am happy to spend the time and resources this involves, in the belief that the development of skills and experience matters as much as the outcome, in the confidence the next one will be better (it is), and that in the longer term I can produce rolling stock at least as good as anything I could buy from Tomytec. (Not World Kogei built-up-brass quality though....)

 

But are you, or others? I know not. You will never acquire models of predictable quality, or quickly, or in large numbers, by this approach to the hobby.

 

All I can say is, describing or explaining what I do is easier than doing it. So........

[Beaver]

All my scratchbuilt rolling stock is made out of plasticard with plastic strip (Plastruct or Evergreen) detail. The essential idea is to make a bottomless box with decorative overlays. The chassis is a tray which is a friction fit into the open bottom of the box.

 

 

The sides of the box are not single layers of plasticard but a laminate of several thin layers. This allows for recessed features like doors, window frames etc, and gives a very robust result. Basically the same idea as Japanese papercraft and paper kits like Sankei, but with plastic.

 

Before I had the Silhouette cutter, I produced matching layers by drawing the layers out on graph paper, glueing the graph paper to the plastic, and cutting out along the lines.

 

 

Then layered together producing sides and ends for assembly.

 

 

 

With the Silhouette cutter, same techniques, finer result.

 

 

 

 

Rooves have been a bit of a problem. I tried carving balsa for rooves but I don't seem to have any knack for what is basically sculpture. Mostly I use roof assemblies from old scrapped models, model kits etc, modified to suit.

 

 

Goods vans are actually often sealed boxes with the bogies screwed straight to the bottom since there is no reason to need to get inside.

 

 

Bogies or 4 wheel chassis are mostly those made for the European 009 and H0e market, carefully chosen for Japanese outline suitability by comparing them against prototype photo archives online. In fact, archives such as tsushima-keibendo, umemado and freightcar.jp are the principal source of information and inspiration for my creations.

 

Other bought in parts; complex details, transfers (decals) etc, are obtained from Japanese small manufacturers such as Echo Model, Pairhands, Arumo, etc. Hobby Search actually has a very good stock of these parts. Anything they cannot supply can usually be obtained from Narrow Garage. Their international sales system is very simple: send an email asking for it, pay the paypal request when it's emailed to you, and sooner or later it will turn up.

 

 

[Cat]

Better living with styrene strips — well done!

[cteno4]

@Space Beaver 

 

Very nicely done! Great to see the silhouette cutter works so well with the thin styrene, I’ve never tried styrene with mine. What thickness is it? Do you need two passes? What blade are you using?

 

I too love the layered technique that you can easily do with the silhouette or a laser cutter.

 

thanks for presenting your work, great to see and lots of stimulation and ideas for the rest of us!

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Beaver]

On cutting

 

As I only have the lightweight Portrait 3, all cutting is done with the AutoBlade. No other tool will fit except for the pen holder.

 

I have used sheets of up to 30 thou without difficulty. Beyond 15 thou, the blade will not cut all the way through, but will go deep enough to create snap lines to break the parts out after cutting. 30 I use for buildings, rolling stock uses only 10 thou. I have not tried 40 thou or larger.

 

Cutting such dense material cleanly and without damage is best done with many gentle passes. For up to 15 thou I use settings of force 5 speed 1 at blade depth 5 with 2 passes, usually running the cut twice to be sure. However for the thicker stuff there is no choice but to go in hard, force 33 speed 1 at blade depth 10 with 2 passes, usually only running the cut once. However in order to avoid damaging the machine it is necessary to first score the material using the settings for thinner stuff so that the blade is digging into an already half open cut, reducing the strain.

 

Obviously, by using less force and depth it is possible to deliberately score the material rather than cutting it, to create planking detail for instance. It this case there need to be two copies of the file, one with the scoring details included and one without them. Load material, load scoring file, run scoring cut, load cutting file, run cutting cut, of course never unloading the material from the machine until all work has been completed, to ensure all cuts line up.

 

On layering

 

Warping of the material after assembly is always a risk. Odd numbers of layers are more stable than even numbers of layers. I usually use 3 structural layers (side skin, window frames, doors) with a partial 4th layer where needed (such as behind doors if making doors with recessed panelling).

 

Most solvents are too aggressive to produce laminated parts that stay flat. I have some cars that are not quite square because the parts warped and then had to be forced back into shape during assembly. Limonene, a weak lemon acid, has given me the best results. Brush it all over the layers on the appropriate faces, place layers together and align, place in a press for 24 hours. Parts I layered this way have so far never warped.

 

I made my own press out of old picture frames.

 

 

Pressing between two pieces of glass gives perfect flatness while the frame prevents the upper part of the press sliding about and pushing layers out of alignment if the press is disturbed.

 

The press sits on top of another glass sheet which lives on the workbench and is a very effective aid to accurate and square assembly of parts as it is completely unyielding, perfectly flat, and cannot become stuck to the model being assembled no matter what materials or adhesives are being used.

[cteno4]

Great stuff, thanks very much!

 

I’ve never heard of D-Limonene as a plastic solvent, but it makes total sense. Slow cure on thin materials with a less powerful solvent to prevent total softening of the styrene and warping.

 

love the frame set up to lock plates from sliding. Always a bit of an issue when using weights on lamination like this. Glass is nice solution as well so nothing sticking. I’ve always used wax paper but glass is simpler.

 

jeff

 

[Beaver]

Here are those two vans from earlier, now finished. Well there is still the shiny wheels but the chemical blackener stuff is a step too far for bringing hazardous materials into a student house! I already hide my spray cans and booth and a few other things every time a room inspection is due!

 

 

I don't think I mentioned before the sources of markings for my rolling stock:

 

Company initials are cut out of thin self adhesive sheet on the Silhouette cutter because I do not have my own printer to do transfers and in any case making white transfers is very difficult - where do you get white ink for a domestic grade printer designed to work with white paper?

 

Car numbers and type kana are from the Aru Model generic private railway transfers set. The set also includes some generic shamon but I didn't like the look of any of them so chose to use romanji (should be phonecianji really) initials instead as is plausible for post WW2 setting.

 

Data markings including weights, measures, data panels etc are from the World Kogei 1/87 JNR wagon and van markings sets. This does mean that the figures are rather unrealistic (fifteen tonnes, really........), but I have never found a source of keiben specification data transfers, which is odd as including data as well as the basic number + type was actually quite a common (but not universal) keiben practice.

 

All transfers are rub down as is usual for Japanese suppliers. I hold them in place with a bit of masking tape then rub down with an empty pen. Sealed with varnish coat afterwards, brush for goods stock, spray for passenger stock and locomotives.

Edited February 14, 2023 by Beaver

[Beaver]

One thing I really like about the local railway scene is the enormous creativity displayed in repurposing and renewing rolling stock and other things using the minimum of resources. To a certain extent we still see this today, eg; buying a 6/8/10 car ex metro train and splitting it into 2/3/4 car trains by adding some extra cabs. However when standards were lower and skilled labour cheaper this practice could extend to very substantial transformations and indeed to the construction of new stock in-house. Some companies were particularly famous for this, for example Echigo Koutsu, whose Nagaoka and Tochio lines were a wild menagerie of new, old, second hand, purchased, homemade, modified, remade and transformed. Many consists had no two cars alike!

 

http://nankaru.info/operation/ph201307-1.html

 

So there is ample opportunity for creating all sorts of things on all sorts of pretexts.

 

For example, let us say we have an old body from a second hand kiha we took all the underparts off of. Well, there is a need for more carriages. So we cut off the steps because our platforms are higher, take off the headlights and things. We use end doors and gangways wherever possible, so cut out the driving cabs complete with ends.

 

 

Those ventilators are very unreliable - hardly surprising when there are no air inlets in them. So they get removed for replacement while a couple of bogies are found in the long grass behind the depot and fitted to the remains of the original chassis.

 

 

New ends are designed for the sheet cutters to have a go at. Can't match the style of the original windows, so instead use the modern style complete with round corners and rubber sealed windows. They don't match the sides? Well nor did the ends on one of Mie Koutsu's 220 series motors after it hit a broken down car on a level crossing and needed rebuilding.

 

 

So new ends laminated and fitted, new ventilators (Echo Model) installed, fill and sand roof, now once the gaps under the doors where the steps were can be filled in, it can go to the paint shop.

 

 

But you already get an idea of the finished look.

[Beaver]

I obtained a couple of small loco bodies from a US H0n30 supplier. Typical modern 3D prints designed to clip onto a Kato 11-108/9/10 series power unit. Ebay seller apogeelocoworks.

 

 

The boxcab was somewhat dull and unappealing as well as lacking detail so I sold it on.

 

 

The steeplecab however was rather nice.

 

 

So I sawed off the shunter's platforms at the ends, recovered the buffer beams and slotted them to clear the Kato couplings, drilled a hole in the roof to get at the pantograph mounting screw and made up a plasticard support platform for the pantograph; a One Mile product (made for them by Aru Model) intended for their Toden 7000 series tramcar model.

 

 

American industrial locos apparently don't have doors, so I used two from scrapped Minintrains H0n30 carriages. Head and tail lights are also reclaimed - fittings from Bachmann N scale American steam switcher tender bodies. Cab steps are lengths of plastic signal ladder. Everything was assembled using superglue as nothing much else will stick to resin.

 

 

Main body colour spray painted and then the head/tail light lenses and the white trim were done in with ultrafine brushes and cocktail sticks. More Aru Model transfers and everything sealed with spray varnish which isn't really as 'anti-shine matt' as one would have expected. Glazing is done last of all to keep it free of paint and varnish; some unidentified rigid clear plastic from the scrap box, attached using Deluxe Materials Glue & Glaze. Spills and runs of excess Glue & Glaze should not be wiped up - the spills dry perfectly clear and invisible but wiping will produce opaque smears that don't come off.

 

 

Like everything else I've made, it is no good as an isolated display model but is meant to be seen together in operation with others in the context of an appropriate scenic setting.

Edited February 21, 2023 by Beaver

[Beaver]

I am increasingly preferring to scratchbuild models 'from the raw' rather than bash existing kits or models as it generally gives better results at lower cost with less waste. To some extent it seems that bashing things mainly employs the bashed parts as psychological supports to give the modeller the confidence to proceed with the project. Nonetheless, using bits of other people's work can be helpful to fill the gaps where neither detail parts sold for the home builder nor the products of one's own workbench will cover what you need.

 

Like making a couple of balcony coaches, one in full Taisho elegance with matchboard sides and American style clerestory roof, one of later and simpler design. The starting point was the remains of two Minitrains American HOn30 carriages and the body parts from two Dundas Models 009 kits of Welsh Highland Railway carriages.

 

 

The starting point for the wooden car was to lengthen the roof and floor and splice the sides together from sections of the Welsh sides. I chose this particular kit because the matchboarding was correct for a Japanese carriage; equally sized matches all the way along. European style matchboarding often uses larger matches under the window pillars. Bogies are Peco. I originally planned to fit the Minitrains carriage doors into the Dundas ends but gave this up as too difficult given that the ends needed to be narrowed too - to make the car look old the width and height are made notably more restricted than the steel cars. Instead I used complete unaltered Minitrains carriage ends.

 

 

Floor plates for both cars were lengthened with Plasticard scrap and reinforced with long plastic rods which also represent the seats. Rather than make a separate chassis and body I decided that the bodies should be assembled onto the floors/chassis with removable rooves. It is harder to get parts to fit well this way but was necessary for strength and is in any case easier to do than usual given the structure of these particular carriages, using sides and ends that were commercially designed and made to fit together.

 

 

Meanwhile, the sides for the big steel carriage were designed in Silhouette Studio. 3 layers of 10 thou per side.

 

 

Wooden car sides assembled. The alternating droplights and larger fixed windows of the Dundas kit were very British but for a Japanese car the windows should be the same size and shape all the way along so I made inserts on the Silhouette cutter to fill in part of the large windows giving five pairs of identical smaller windows, plastic strip completing the pattern.

 

 

The roof was made by splicing part of another roof into it and test fitted once the basic structure of the body was complete.

 

 

Once the roof was tidied up I filled in the windows (Japanese 762mm gauge clerestory carriages seem to either not have clerestory windows or have lost them by the post WW2 period. Perhaps they were not large enough to give a useful amount of light), and test fitted it again onto a tidied up body with more detail and balconies widened to suit. The roof sag is not unreasonable for a car that is supposed to be 50 years old and soon to be scrapped.

 

 

Meanwhile the steel car was cut out, laminated and assembled, modelled with some of the droplight windows open. Ends are from the Dundas kit with matchboards filled in and Minitrains doors fitted. I want the steel car to look like a rebuild of a wooden car of the same design as the wooden car. Roof was made up from the Dundas kit parts and straightened out later with some reinforcements on the inside,

 

 

I don't usually put trusses under the floor on my carriages. But a wooden car must have them so I used a pair taken from a Tomytec carriage. With filler applied to the roof, the only parts still to add before painting and finishing are torpedo ventilators on the sides of the clerestory. Meanwhile the steel car has a properly fitting roof now and has largely been straightened out - the long, largely unsupported sides were causing issues.

 

I do not intend to have any balcony cars besides these two as in the post WW2 period they were decidedly historic, no longer made and being steadily withdrawn nationwide and so having a lot of them in 1964 would make the railway look impoverished and struggling. Same goes for any other wooden bodied passenger stock.

 

 

Edited April 10, 2023 by Beaver

[Beaver]

The little four wheeler I used in some of my technique demonstration pictures earlier is now complete. As with balcony cars, four wheelers will be restricted in number as there should not be many about by the 1960s. A second is being painted now with no plans for a third. The last four wheel passenger cars I know of were the two on the Choshiden that lasted into the seventies.

 

 

It is a completely generic creation with some reference to the Igasa Railway four wheelers which provide the prototypical example of having only one door on each side. Like the Igasa examples it is supposed to be a postwar steel body on the chassis of an old wooden four wheeler from the railway's initial stock bought back in 1910.

 

All my four wheel passenger stock uses Lilliput Austrian H0e passenger car chassis as N gauge chassis are too small and low-riding. This did mean that the chassis was by far the most expensive part of the entire model...........

[marknewton]

On 5/3/2023 at 7:08 AM, Beaver said:

The last four wheel passenger cars I know of were the two on the Choshiden that lasted into the seventies.

Befu Railway continued to use a four-wheel passenger car up until its closure in 1984. Your model is very nice! 👍

 

All the best,

 

Mark.

[Beaver]

 

Just a pair of repainted and re'letter'ed Tomytec WaFu. Oh, and I wrapped the rooves in tissue paper for roofing felt effects.

 

And the beginnings of a Shimoden style EMU set.

 

 

Once the Enshu style motor car has finished being detailed and repainted.

[MangakaRailfan]

On 1/6/2023 at 7:09 PM, Beaver said:

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.

@Beaver As someone working on a Keiben Micro Layout As well, (Inspired by kusakaru) Do you mind telling me how exactly did you scratchbuild that ToFu? I’ve been meaning to get one for a long time, but they’re all sold out on Hobby search.

[Beaver]

@MangakaRailfan

 

I have had to think over my reply quite carefully for the simple reason that this particular model is a really very bad example built in a very convoluted fashion with a great deal of reworking using lots of the assorted bits and pieces that tend to accumulate over years in the hobby without necessarily even remembering where they came from.

 

In other words, it's not something that I could write instructions or a parts shopping list for or indeed recommend to anyone.

 

So I am going to explain how it went together and then discuss alternative approaches.

 

 

The basis for the body was an old Berliner Bahn German TT wagon body. I thought I could just cut off the TT cabin, build a new HO cabin over the original cabin and brake platform area, and mount the whole thing on Peco 009 bogies with an underframe made from plasticard with C-section microstrip for cosmetic frame sides. The cabin is made from the ends of a Chivers Australian (Innisfail Tramway) coach kit overlaid with planked plasticard with plastic strip framework, a slice of the roof from the same kit and the doors from a Minitrains American H0n30 passenger car. The brake cover is the cover from the original TT cabin bulked out with layers of plasticard.

 

This did not work out very well because the TT sized planks and ironwork on the open wagon section were just too small and low to look right.

 

 

I therefore cut the sides and end of the wagon body off and built up a new open body using planked plasticard, two layers stuck back to back so that there would be detail on the inside and the outside. Ironwork on the wagon body was more L and C section plastic strip.

 

This looked good for a while but the open body quickly warped out of shape, a common problem with making open wagons out of plasticard.

 

 

I therefore fitted bracing inside the open body to hold it in shape, covered it over and added a tarpaulin to disguise the fact that the 'open' body is now actually a solid box. The tarpaulin is tissue paper and the 'roofing felt' on the cabin roof is too. The brake detail was completed with a section of paperclip wire and a piece of U section plastic strip and the cabin footstep is just a strip glued right across the bottom. There are weights sealed inside the wagon section for good running.

 

The roof was painted separately from the body, then the glazing added after painting, the roof then glued on, the tarpaulin painted separately and then glued in place last of all. The tarpaulin needed to be imbued with PVA before painting to strengthen it.

 

Alternative approaches

 

Aru Model make an etched brass Fu cabin which you can assemble and fit to a Tomytec To to make a rather nice ToFu. Alternatively you could scratchbuild a cabin for the Tomytec wagon, or use the ends and a little bit of the sides and roof from a Tomytec WaFu to make a cabin.

 

If you are going to scratchbuild the whole body then it is simple enough to make the cabin and open sections as a pair of boxes and then permanently fit a tarpaulin to disguise the fact that the 'open' section is actually a solid box. Basically what I did but without starting without the TT wagon body which turned out to be a waste of time, or the coach kit parts which could simply be replaced by carefully shaped pieces of plasticard. Going without the Minitrains doors would be more difficult because the panelling is very small but you could use an unprototypical smooth plain door and claim it is a replacement metal door fitted after the wooden ones wore out or broke (this kind of replacement work was common in the 1950s and 60s). Or create a matchboarded door out of suitable finely grooved sheet.

 

Modifying a plastic kit is another choice and probably the route I'll take to make a second ToFu. Basically take an open wagon kit and add a cabin onto it during construction, either a scratchbuilt cabin or one made out of parts from another suitable kit. I have acquired the kits intended for this project but have yet to make a start.

 

Bogies can be any suitable American N scale 'trucks', or take the bogies off a Tomytec coach or van and use the grounded body as a lineside structure. The Peco 009 wagon bogies I used may be available in the USA at inflated cost, but mind that they attach by clipping into a rather large mounting hole rather than using a screw or clip peg into a small hole as the American and Japanese products usually do, and are designed for NEM compatible clip in couplings rather than the US/JP sprung coupler box. (If using Rapidos to match the Tomytec RTR stock then most European manufacturers offer NEM Rapidos in their spare parts ranges, the coupling heights are fortunately already the same worldwide.)

Edited October 1, 2023 by Beaver

[Beaver]

I have now painted the passenger car bashed from a Tomytec KiHa body, and also repainted one of the Tomytec passenger motors that appears to be based on Enshu Okuyama Line stock. Still more tidying and finishing (such as transfers) to do but now I can run 3-car trains of 10-metre bogie stock as intended.

 

 

Maximum car length is 13 metres so you may see longer stock at some point.

[Beaver]

I resumed work on the unstaffed halt waiting shelter that I was originally creating for H0e T-trak use and had abandoned along with the modules. Thanks are due to @Kamome for architectural advice.

 

 

 

Windows are cut from leftover parts from a cheap Tsugawa kit. Only on the back was it really possible to fit 12-panes as this is a rather small building, possibly a bit too small. Doors are Minitrains baggage car doors and the roof is Slaters corrugated iron sheet.

 

Rough edges are an inevitable during the creation of models that are not designed so much as grown. I never quite know what a model is going to look like until it is done. At the start there is only a general idea of the sort of thing to be created (in this case; fully enclosed wooden waiting shelter with corrugated iron roof), some information about real things of that general kind, an awareness of the limitations to work within (such as the space in which something must fit) and a collection of materials and parts that might be helpful towards that goal. Along the way the final form becomes clear as each decision leads towards and to some extent locks in particular ideas, premade or Silhouette made parts dictate that some aspects be a certain way, and revisions and reworkings intervene where it looks like the project is moving away from what it is supposed to be.