HOW TO
RECREATE MODERN ENGINEERS’ WAGON LOADS – PART 2
George Dent continues his mission to add realistic loads to his fleet of contemporary engineers’ wagons.
The stacks of steel sleepers makes for a striking addition to this Accurascale MHA.
PHOTOGRAPHY: GEORGE DENT
In MR309, I explained how I created wagon loads for my Accurascale MHA wagons, in the form of bulk bags of fresh ballast. This was just the beginning of my mission to enhance my large fleet of post-privatisation ‐era engineers’ wagons and, boosted by lots of positive feedback from readers, here’s the next instalment…
As mentioned in this month’s Welcome page, my workshop has recently been tidied and reorganised, creating a much more pleasant working environment. As a result of this spring clean, I found a stack of plastic sleepers recovered from a length of Peco flexible track. I forget why they’d been stripped from the rails, but the ‘steel’ sleepers gave me the idea of creating further wagon loads.
Steel sleepers offer many benefits, with long working lives (around 50 years) and they’re recyclable, as well as requiring less ballast. Formed into a hollow, inverted ‘U’-shaped profile, steel sleepers can be stacked, thus reducing storage requirements, and making them easier to transport.
I’ve seen stacks of steel sleepers loaded into a variety of engineers’ wagons over the years, so the Peco sleepers were soon being trimmed and bonded together, ready to adorn the interior of a suitable wagon.
The sleepers did take some time to prepare, cutting away all of the plastic webbing and trimming away the surface detail to allow them to be stacked. However, the couple of hours of tedium were rewarded by a pretty striking end result, so it all proved worthwhile.