Interlocking

The SECR 2-Plank ballast wagon lasted a very long time, from the mid 1910’s through to the 1970’s – as a result, it has been produced by Rapido but also as an STL by Steve Robertson and uploaded to G1-3D.uk here.

Brake Gear

At the time there was no brake gear available, so I modelled my own from scratch, having learned some (but clearly not enough) lessons from the brake gear on my SECR Box Van – namely that producing something printable is at least as important as accuracy of design.

Of course, once I pointed this out Steve quickly uploaded his brake designs making the value of my efforts simply in the learning experience.

Wheels

I have designed and produced my own set of wheels and axles for 1 Gauge, suitable for 3mm or 1/8″ silver steel axles in either ball bearings, or solid brass, and I used those for these pair of wagons: https://www.g1-3d.uk/model/wagon-wheels-g1mra-profiles.

Though cheap ball-bearings are available from chinese wholesalers like AliExpress relatively easily, I find them to be challenging to use and get running well given their tight tolerances, and I tend to prefer solid brass bearings with a looser rolling fit, such as those supplied with Slaters metal wheelsets.

W-Iron design in G1 3D printing isn’t a solved problem yet, with lots of different competing designs, but these ones ‘just work’. To reduce lateral play I added a couple of bits of 1mm styrene onto the inside face of the axlebox recesses, but hardly neccesary.

Painting

Since I had two models to produce, I decided to model the early and late versions of the wagon: one in SR engineer’s red with brakes on both sides and spoked wheels, and the other in SECR dark grey with open-spoke wheels and single-sided brakes.

There are many who are fastidious in their replication of colour in models, and I personally think this is a fool’s errand, since colour scales very differently in full size and model forms, to say nothing of surface finish, fading and weathering. As long as I’m broadly internally consistent and use correct markings, I’m quite happy.

This has meant a slow departure from specific colour tones like “German Black-Brown” or “Brake Dust” towards more base pigments like Cadmium Red, Pthalo Green, etc. – though we’re not quite there yet.

The SR version of this wagon is painted with a mixture of warm red, brown and orange to get close to the SR Engineers red colour, and transferred up with some spares of large G1 sheets I had a while back. The ‘ED’ is harvested from an LMS ‘REFRIGERATED’ marking, which I’m sure I’ll regret in future.

Those large sheets did not have transfer film cut to the shape of the underlying letters and numbers, so they needed to be trimmed closely, and with a judicious use of Microsol and Microset to apply. Several coats of fluid later, an overall coat of glossy floor polish to unify the surfaces and provide a resilient surface for washes was applied by brush.

Final Details

The wagons are fitted with my own design of Maunsell SECR buffers printed solid on the filament printer, Walsall Model Industries sprung coupling hooks.

Finished Model(s)

I think it would be lovely to get an SR or SECR ballast brake van and some single-bolster trucks carrying rail for a proper Engineer’s Department Train!