Construction of Railcar Nr 1

Railcar 1 is the first railcar I have build for my garden railroad. The picture is taken on my old layout "Chemin de fer Juruth".

It does not have a specific prototype but was freely scratch build to resemble a French like narrow gauge railcar. It was a learning process by itself.

 

The construction was pretty straight forward. It is mostly build from white styrene sheets.

The chassis was build up arround an LGB motorblock. On the chassis the battery, receiver and controller are placed.

The railcar is radio controlled (RC) as I don't power and control train through the tracks what is more conventional.

My experience is that track power on outdoor railroads always brings connection problems after time. RC ensures a more reliable operating of the trains.

Later on the build I replaced the receiver and speed controller for a complete RC unit I retrieved from an old cheap RC toycar. This way I also can use the transmitter of the RC car to control the railcar. The RC unit was flat enough to build inside the roof of the railcar. It will stick out of the roof a bit but that will be 'camouflaged' with the luggage rack on top of the railcar.

The use of these RC units from toys is actually a very easy and cheap way to supply trains with RC. Some of these units also power lights or sounds that can be used in the trains.

So it give some nice low-cost opportunities and it is nice to experiment with it.

However it has its downsides also. The range of the receiver and transmitter are mostly much smaller than the more 'proffesional'  sets that are used in RC modelling. On larger railroads this could mean you have to follow the train to keep it running.
Also, these toy RC units are very sensitive to interference. This will influence the operation of the train.

An other problem is when the unit is broken you can not easily fix it. You have to replace the complete unit for a similar one.
To be honest, it is a cheap and easy solution but I regret it I did not used the conventional speed controller and receiver. I am planning to replace it in the future.

The luggage rack was made from polystyrene as well. The roof is hollow and constructed with parts of balsa wood. The bottom of the luggage rack is polystyrene with carved in planks. On top luggage is placed to cover up the highest part of the RC unit.
The luggage is made out of little crates and boxes from 1:35 scale military kits combined with luggage and chickens sculpted from Fimo or Milliput.A railing was later made from pieces of metal and styrene.

 The front is made from a piece of mosquito bait.

The whole car was than sprayed with primer and paint in the light beige/red scheme. Details where later painted on.