HOW TO MODEL A BRAKE VAN RAILTOUR

With a little adaptation, Chris Leigh turns a Dapol kit into a railtour brake van.

Knowing that at least one of the European manufacturers of ‘HO’ scale figures makes a set of railway photographers with cameras, I though it might be fun to model a brake van railtour. For the

sake of economy, I decided to use the Dapol BR 20ton brake van kits. These are a revamp of the original Airfix plastic kit, which was always fun to build, and Dapol now supplies metal wheelsets which makes them a viable proposition for decent running qualities. However, they still need adapting to replace the old-fashioned Americanstyle couplings with tension-locks, and the addition of some weight to improve road-holding.

STEP BY STEP 1

As a general rule you can tell how old a plastic kit is by the amount of flash on the mouldings. Flash is the result of liquid plastic squeezing between the faces of well-worn tools. It is easily removed with a sharp knife and files.

2

The complete removal of flash is pivotal to a good-looking finished model. After I trimmed off the worst with a sharp knife, I used a coarse file and then a flat needle file to smooth areas such as the verandah openings.

3

I don’t enjoy batch-building, but in this case I had no choice so I set out to build three kits simultaneously, starting with the underframes and floors as soon as I had removed any flash.

4

Assembly begins by fitting the ‘spine’ of the underframe to the underside of the floor. I used EMA Plastic Weld adhesive applied with a small paintbrush for all plastic-to-plastic joints.

5

On the back of the solebars are small pips either side of the axleguards. These pips are the mounting points for the brake hangers, two per wheel. They were positioned carefully so as not to rub against the wheel treads.

6

The pin-point axles of the wheelsets supplied require brass top-hat bearings, but it was lockdown and some products were in short supply. I could only get bearings for plainended axles so these would have to suffice.

7

I carefully drilled the plastic axleboxes so that these larger bearings were a good press-fit and pressed them in with the handle of my craft knife. No glue was needed. I then filed the back edge of the bearing flush with the plastic.

8

For the second and third builds, I cut off the original coupler pivot mountings with a razor saw before fitting the spines to the floors. I had already decided that I would fit tension-locks rather than scale screw couplings.

9

I used Parkside Models (Peco) PA34 mounting blocks with Bachmann 36-027 couplings. The plastic mounting blocks were glued to the underside of the floor with the ‘fish-tail’ cut-out facing outwards.

10

The next stage was to fit the completed solebars to the floor using Deluxe Materials Plastic Magic liquid polystyrene cement. With the axles inserted in the bearing cups, the second solebar was then glued in place.

11

Body assembly followed next. The great thing about batch-building is that any lessons learned while assembling the first kit can be applied to the subsequent builds without further experimentation or mistakes.

12

As the end verandahs of my models were to be ‘populated’, I felt that the doors should be open. This meant that the heavy mounting flange around the door frame needed to be filed away.

13

It proved to be a lot of work, so some were modelled with closed doors. The outer wall of the verandah was added next, making sure to get top corner joints that were both strong and neat.

14

I was concerned about the lack of weight, so I made a box out of styrene sheet and strip and filled it with PVA glue and ‘liquid lead’ shot from Ripmax. This is used by model fliers for balancing aircraft models.

15

Before we get ahead of ourselves I should point out a mould alignment issue which led to a ridge of flash on the top edge of the side mouldings. The near side shows the ridge, the far side after filing it off.

16

With all three vans at the same stage, they now needed painting before they could be glazed and the roofs added. The buffers are quite vulnerable so I left them until last.

17

As these were wooden-bodied vans I felt that I could get away with brush-painting them. I used Humbrol acrylic No. 113 for the bauxite and Omen acrylics for underframe and roof. A red oxide primer spray could have been used.

18

The side step boards are moulded as one piece and I found that the mounting holes in the solebars required opening out with the point of a knife blade twisted in them. This done, they fitted easily.

19

As the photographs show, no two brake vans were exactly the same colour so I experimented with weathering, using Humbrol black wash to emphasise the wooden planking and Tamiya weathering powders to add dirt.

20

I used both Preiser and Noch photographer figures plus appropriate figures to give the verandah ends a fairly crowded look. The figures were placed with tweezers and glued with Velo-set PVA before fitting the roof.