Drafting more troops to the Collection

An unexpected and most generous offer from Stephen from the Tunnies Terrain Blog was posted in the comment-section in an earlier post this year. He offered me bags of 1:76 scale Airfix originals for free. Wow! -What an offer!! I humbly accepted.

Stephen's generous gift sent me to the Post-Office today to pick up this exciting parcel. Which coincidentally arrived just before my Birthday as well: 

This is very brief look of what was inside:

Lets take a closer look at the content:

71 American Civil War Confederates:

79 American Civil War Unions:

43 Napoleonic Highlanders:

15 Modern NATO Ground Crew:

50 WWII Australians and Gurkhas:

32 WWII German Mountain Troops:

43 WWII German Infantry:

60 WWII US Paratroopers. Some of them were painted:

52 WWII Italian Infantry:

70 WWII British Infantry:

29: WWII British Paratroopers:

Stephen does not only run the Tunnies Terrain Blog, but he also used to run the business Tunnies Terrain and made terrain and scenic items for wargaming. He still stocks some these items, and if you want to know more about what's still available he can be contacted directly through his Blog or Facebook. So he added to the unexpected surprise by adding some groups of trees he made while running his business. It's a very clever design allowing you to instantly add wooded areas and a small forrest to your tabletop:

I vaguely have some plans how to use these figures and great trees for various projects already. Some of them will go to useful bits and pieces. But I urgently feels like deploying these soldiers in some kind of improvised wargame soon despite they're being unpainted at the time. Time will show, so please follow this blog if you don't already do so.

Thank you very much for the generous gift Stephen! 

Blog PostScript 

ChatGPT-generated images of imaginary 'action figures' are still trending on Facebook, so here is another one related to the theme of this blog-post:

Flat-car conversions followed by another "Day out"

It's spring and the season for more outdoor activities is about to begin again. -Like running trains in the garden, and preparing rolling stock for the coming season.

Flatcar 1

A fellow garden railway modeller was recently downsizing his collection, and I know he has a lot of hand-built items and scratchbuilt rolling stock. Among the items in his collection he was getting rid off there was a flatcar built after a Norwegian prototype from the Aurskog Høland Railway. I've always liked this flatcar, and he made me an offer I couldn't resist:

There was only one challenge; He's been running trains on 32mm gauge, while I run my garden railway on 45mm gauge. I didn't think this was a problem as I could just change bogies, so while at Modellbau Schleswig Holstein I bought a couple of LGB bogies (in 45mm gauge) to replace his 32mm bogies. 

But, when finally trying to fit my new bogies on the flatcar I saw that it wasn't so simple as I'd imagined as my new LGB bogies were too large and long and came in contact wit the truss bars on the underside of the wagon, making it impossibel to fit or turn:

The original 32mm gauge to the left, and the new LGB 45mm gauge bogie to the right

Since I was eager to bring this new wagon to our next running section I actually didn't have time to order any new and smaller bogies from UK. I found a free file on Thingiverse for a 'bogie kit' I could 3D-print. My metal wheels were larger than the kit was made for, so some adjustments were necessary: 

Finally fitted the bogies to the flat-wagon. I think the result turned out just ok.

Flatcar 2 and 3

I got a couple of LGB G-scale flatcars built to 32mm gauge really cheap last year. These were LGB originals, so here I could just replace their bogies with LGB ones. I've been running them occasionally behind my War Department live steam locomotive, but I wasn't too happy with them as they were in a American and civil livery:

First of all, they were missing buffers, so I found a couple of free files on Thingivere again which I could 3D-print:

The new buffers were assembled and superglued to the wagons. I wanted them to look both more generic and military so I could run them behind both my British W^D locomotive or my German Heeresfeldbahn. I painted them in 2 different grey shades, and made one look a little 'older' than the other. The light grey one was fitted with spooked wheels and older buffers, while the darker one got more 'modern' buffers and disc wheels. The old one got a deck of aged wood, while the newer one got a newer one. I also made them ready for3-link couplings:

Time to take the new flatcars for a Day out

Heine invited to another running session in his garden. So to haul my new flatcars I brought my Roundhouse W^D Billy livesteam locomotive, with the new driver:

I assembled my rake in the fiddleyard. First the hand built flatcar with the new 3D-printet bogies:

Then the 'new' flatcar:

And the the 'old' one loaded with a Jeep for the occasion:

The rest of the member making their trains ready in the fiddleyard:

And then it was finally time to take it out for a ride:

There is a large variation of trains and scales among our members, ranging from German...

...Swiss...

...American...

An American Shay

...German(s) again...

This is actually a German military Heeresfeldbahn locomotive in civilian postwar livery 

...And finally another British. Whats particular with this model is that it's a Gauge 1/ 1:32 scale model (which again is the same as 54mm figure scale). As it's a Standard Gauge model, it will run on the very same 45mm gauge tracks that the G-scale narrow gauge model runs:

A Gauge 1 Terrier:

The Terrier is a small steam locomotive, but side by side my 16mm/ 1:19 scale narrow gauge locomotive it becomes tiny despite being Standard Gauge. The scale is different, and they only share the same gauge of 45mm:

Another peculiar detail of Gauge 1 and 'G-scale', is that below there are 2 Standard Gauge models which are both made to run on 45mm gauge track. -So in theory these should both be to same scale. It's obvious that's only in the theory though, as the locomotive is a true Standard Gauge model, but the Thomas-coach is a G-scale model made as 'standard gauge' and somewhat too large for a 'standard gauge' model, but at the same time too small for a G-scale model.

During our break. Heine is is a very caring host, and kicked off the BBQ-season.

Note the 'Terrier' ON the dining table. At home we usually have a 'Terrier' UNDER the dining table (during meals):

Linus

Thank you for the invitation and your hospitality Heine!
Great photo he captured too:

 🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂

Blog PostScript

By the time at posting this, there seems to "be a thing" at Facebook where everyone is using ChatGPT to generate images of "toy action figures" of them selves or their fields of interests. I wanted to try it as well, and "there is a prototype for every thing". It would be cool to see it in production though: