Margnat tankcar part II

Brakeman's cabin

The brakeman's cabin is made from styrene sheets and I used a red LED, switch and battery to create a red lantern. The backside holds the battery and switch. The front and sides of the cabin are glued together and function as cover; it can be removed to get to the battery. The braking lever holds it in place. The roof will be removable also to get easy access to the switch.

A part of the cars railing was cut away to make room for the cabin. The railing on the other side of the cabin was made out of the removed part. It was glued to the cabin with superglue.

The upper part braking lever will be covered like it is seen on this Wikepedia picture of a similar cabin. The lever can be operated from within the cabin through a covered opening.

Batteryholder and switch

Work in progress

The LED itself is stuck into a piece of stryreen pipe that is glued on the side. The lantern is build up aground the pipe from bits of styrene and putty/filler.A little piece of wire is used as hand grip for the lantern. The cover for the lever is made out of the plastic base of a roll of tape. The top is a piece of styrene. It has some rivets on top (spots of white glue).

Some smaller detailing. The tank opening is made out of a small nut, a piece of small chain and a small plastic cap. Painted in metal color.

Platform

The platform had to be constructed i a way that they can withstand outdoor use (so not to fragile). I formed the frame out of iron wire, bend in the desired shape. The railings and steps were also made this way and soldered in place.

Footplates were made out of mosquito maze (the grey kind you can buy in DIY stores).

Staff

I made the shunter figure out of Fimo clay. It is sculpted in the same way as Torrence.
It looks nice although it is a bit bigger than most figures (more 1:20 scale). Ah well, it's just a big lad!

Flag is made out of a toothpick and a piece of thin soda can.

Some pictures of the completed car on the former railway:

Margnat tankcar part I

The Margnat tankcar on the former railway

In 2010 I started with the conversion of a LGB/ToyTrain tankcar (LGB 9040) into a French (looking) narrow gauge "wagon citerne". 

In this post I will describe how I painted the car and made decals for the Margnat signs. In a second post I will describe how I made the brakeman's cabin  and the platform.

The donor car was the LGB #94040 "Lehmann Benzin".

Notice that the rivets on top of the tank are interrupted. I made some replacements using drips of water resistant white glue. 

Missing rivets

New rivets

The molding seam were sanded away on top of the tank and on one of the topsides. The other topside can be removed like a lid and was molded in another way so it did not have a visible seam.

Painting

The color scheme is inspired by the H0 "Margnat" tank cars from Jouef, with blue as the main color and a logo in white with red lettering.  I made a simple drawing in Paint to see how the tankcar would look like with our without brakeman's cabin and with small or bigger logo. This gave a impression on how the car will become.  The lower left option was eventually the winner.

 

First I sprayed the whole tank gloss white (rattle can from DIY store) as gloss paint is easier to apply decals on than satin or matt paint. When dry I taped off the rectangle where the logo will come.

Sprayed white and tape in place

 

Next I sprayed the rest of the tank in Tamiya "French Blue" as it came close to the color of the Jouef tankers and the name sounded just right ;-)

Unfortunately the paint reacted somehow to the white gloss paint but only on a specific place; the edge of the side that can be opened. I don't know what caused the paint to react like this on this specific spot but the damaged paint looked terrible.

After the paint wa dry I carefully sanded the damaged spots, applied some filler and sanded again with fine Tamiya sanding papers. Than sprayed again.

This did not restore it as much as I first hoped for. Than some fellow modellers pointed out that it looked very much as rust spots painted over. It was not too bad, some weathering would even make it look realistic...

 

The white rectangle looked very sharp and nice. The blue paint did bleed a bit through the tape but this could easily be fixed wit some white gloss paint applied with a small brush.

Decals

The Margnat logo was also made in Paint, using a picture I found of and old emaille Margnat commercial sign. These looked a bit more interesting than the simple logo on the Jouef cars but are still close to the original.The method I used was probably not the most effective, certainly not with modern day techniques;  I converted the picture in Paint into a very simple 16 color BMP file (so actually the photo is simplified into a sort of drawing). Than I spend hours of filling pixels in the right colors....

 But all that work was pretty rewarding and this is how it looks afterwards:

Next I printed it a few times in different sizes to see how it looks like:

After chosen the right sizes (some big for the sides, a smaller for the topside) I printed the signs on a piece of Testors transparent decal paper. After printing I let it dry for 30 minutes and than I sprayed varnish over the decals to seal the not waterproof printer ink so it's not washed away when the decal gets in the water. Using varnish to seal the decals is much cheaper than to buy waterproof ink.

The decals were printed on a simple inkjet printer (Lexmark Z617 in 2010).

Top side logo

One of the top sides also has a Margnat logo. This side was actually a sort of lid that could be removed. This made it very easy to work with. First sprayed in gloss white, than the circle where the logo would come was covered with a cheap plastic cup in just the right size and sprayed in blue. Next step was to apply the decal as described above.

Plastic cup for masking

Logo in place

Putting the parts together

Underside was painted in matt colors

After putting the car back together it was weathered using mainly thinned oil paints (the artist type oil paints in tubes). Actually it looked already very nice as you can see on the pictures below. I could have stopped now but I decided to place a brakeman's cabin and a platform above the tank on it, so... on to part II.

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