Little Progress

There has been little progress on Nystrup Gravel during the last month. Obligations in other directions have been taking up my available time. Fortunately things are now getting better as we move into the traditional modelling season. As a small appetizer I added a few additional broad leafed plants to the layout's right end front.

The right end of my small layout will be further developed in the coming weeks with the prospect of melting together with the rest of the landscaped part. Other projects on the list are cab interior in the Fowler diesel, and painting of a few small scale models that I didn't get to finish during summer. The major reasons for not being able to show more progress is two other railway events in my life.

As usual I attended the huge railway exhibition InnoTrans in Berlin during september. I knew the managing director of Nystrup Gravel was also going, but I didn't meet him (among 170.000 attendees it would have been no small wonder). As usual I was part of my company's staff manning our exhibition stand, but I managed some tours round the exhibition and even got to see some narrow gauge equipment. The exhibiting companies continue to use models to illustrate their products and is to a large extent using 3D printed models. 

The most detailed models were seen at the stand of Полтавський Тепловозоремонтний завод (Poltava Locomotive Repair Plant) from Ukraine. In addition to the 1/87 scale TjME3 above a model of a M62-locomotive was also exhibited.

The use of 3D printed models is becoming very widespread. Here the technology is used to show maintenance equipment complete with scale figure.

Shortly after a week spent in Berlin for Innotrans the major event for vintage narrow gauge industrial railway enthusiasts in continental Europe, the 'Feldbahntreffen' was hosted by the Hedeland vintage railway (HVB), where I spend a good deal of my spare time. Volunteers had planned and prepared the event for several months, but most of the work took place in the week before the meeting and during the four day it lasted. Four Dutch vehicles visited HVB, the first time the railway has hosted foreign locomotives. Naturally I spent a lot of time planning, working and enjoying the meeting.

Visiting Dutch locomotive nr. 6 'Ijsseloord' from Smalspoor Katwijk Leiden.

One Dutch engine and two Danish resting after a day's work on the 5 km HVB.

110 European enthusiasts from Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, Sweden, Finland, Romania, Ukraine and Poland joined more than 40 volunteers from HVB for four days of networking, presentations, train rides and visits to usually off limits workshops and storage buildings.  

Wooden box with 'Nystrup Gravel' painted on top in use as illustrative load in a wagon during the 32. Internationales Feldbahntreffen at the Hedeland vintage railway 10.-13.October.

I now hope to be able to devote a few more evenings for modelling and hopefully breathe some life into this blog again!

New Plants

Last week I experimented with some soft plastic broad leaved plants and I decided to carry on with the work. The soft plastic took paint reasonably well and I liked the contrast to the overwhelmingly grassy growth on the layout. My layout is too small for 1/19 scale trees so variety in low growing vegetation is important.

Butterbur plants with an assortment of grass tufts, stones and ground cover on the small slope next to the fuel and lubrication shed.

Before fixing the plastic plants, I glued some grass tufts in place and also fixed a piece of scrap wood and some rusty scrap metal to the slope. Then I scattered some finely sieved brownish sand to the slope fixing it with thinned white glue. The holes for the plants were kept open with tooth picks that kep away sand and glue. Further holes for plants were made after the glue had dried. I simply punch holes through the top of the layout with a screwdriver.

Before the glue dried completely I added the first butterbur plants. While I was working a sign saw the staff somewhat baffled. 

With the plants in place I'm now wondering if I should fit some more in the same area and perhaps also add a little 'colony' of the plants near the lorry loading ramp. The most important development is however, that I've now begun to add ground cover and vegetation to the layout's right hand end. I hope to have the whole layout covered by Christmas.

A zoomed out view of the fuel shed (a resin kit from Kippo Models) showing the right hand end of the layout with the fence creating a minimum of a scenic break. I built the shed back in 2019.

Politics at Nystrup Gravel

Most model railway enthusiasts are not incorporating politics on their layouts. On Nystrup Gravel on the other hand it's actively integrated into the history of company, layout and the figures giving character to my Nystrup universe. For general elections period election posters are hung on telegraph poles and prominent personalities on the layout have political views representative of Danish political history. Sometimes small anomalies creep in, though. 

The fuel and lubrication shed was a favourite spot for posters. As many political observations were present among Nystrup staff the political posters were often changing. The Vespa posters have been up for ages.

The new poster glued to the fuel storage shed is nothing out of the usual despite being in English. The design is 1950's with a simple slogan, although one of the symbols seems to be a little off for the modelling period.  You can't get everything right. It turned out the conservative owner of Nystrup Gravel didn't approve of the poster's anti-royal statement and as the chief mechanic didn't like the anti-communist hint they both agreed to let it quietly dissappear. 

Experimenting With Vegetation

In February I acquired some artificial grass from IKEA for an experiment with high vegetation looking a bit like the rushes growing in poorly drained areas. Although intially very promising, I ditched the solution after having installed a few tufts of cut down IKEA grass. It was too obviously plastic grass from IKEA and no amount of matt varnish or detail painting could hide that - particularly as they were placed at the layout's front edge. Now a new experiment is unfolding at the same location: planting butterbur.

At the right end of the small layout new, experimental plants have started growing

I don't know where I bought the plastic plants with large leaves, but they were probably cheap. I found 3 wraps of them in a bag while cleaning out a cupboard and they look like a type of plastic plants used by by people keeping fish in aquariums. They are from the time when I modelled in 1/35 scale and I probably decided they were too large for 1/35. Now I wanted to try them out in 1/19 scale.

A handful of plants were wiped with a wet cloth and when dry given a spray with black primer. The root end were cut off and the leaves painted green. Once dry they were stuck into holes on the small slope at the layout's right end.

3 stages of butterbur for Nystrup Gravel (from top down): unpainted plant, primed and painted. The fourth plant is as bought with stem and roots still attached.

First impression of the plastic plants isn't too bad. With some groundcover and a little colour variety these plants stand a greater chance of survival in the Nystrup biosphere than the IKEA grass.

My greatest concern is if the paint will hold on to the soft plastic over time. I have tried to rub the primer off the leaves without succes so perhaps I'm worrying too much. No one will be touching the plants regularly and they can be spot painted if needed.

The roots and stems have been put into storage. They may come in useful later.

Ballasting and Reality

The cab detailing on the Fowler has been hit by the reality of my work life. Not much progress on the small plastic parts to be hidden away in the cab. I have had more succes with adding some vegetation and ballast. Somehow I find it much easier to spend five minutes pouring out a little ballast one evening and then adding glue a few days later.

It's friday and the last train of the day has arrived in the Nystrup Gravel Yard. The Fowler locomotive is shunted by the little Lister. Probably for an evening check of a mechanical issue before the first train saturday.

The locos having departed through the building complex a few skips are now checked for oil in the bearings. Even though vegetation and ballast are now in place there is still detailing and weathering to add.

So despite a busy work schedule there's progress on the little Nystrup Gravel layout. I have begun to think it's realistic to have the entire layout fitted with ground cover before year's end. That is an accomplishment as my modelling speed can best be called moderate. I continue having high hopes of greater speeds, but I have to be realistic, as 1/19 scale Nystrup Gravel is only one of my railway endeavours. 

The different railway activities may sometimes limit each other, but mostly they actually add value to one another. And while some readers may wonder if there is a serious fault in the time continuum in Denmark the image below shows that Nystrup Gravel director Erik Holm is actually attending the world's largest railway exhibition Innotrans in Berlin later in september. I'm attending as well, and I have a few questions to ask if I bump into Mr. Holm.

Trade visitor pass to Innotrans for Nystrup managing director Holm.

Easy Living - Vacation

After a week in Germany my vacation has now settled into the slow rythm of doing very little in a slow pace. Giving my house a little paint, interrupted by watching the olympics and generally enjoying life with wife and family. A little train running and a start on the cab interior on the Fowler diesel has been added to the few things accomplished. 

Running the Fowler back and forth on a short temporary garden line in front of my garden shed. Very relaxing!

With the help of images and drawings from an article by Bill Strickland in the November 1980 issue of 'Merioneth Mercury' I've begun making interior details for the Fowler cab. I'm just getting started on the brake installation and sand boxes. It's fiddly work and I hope it will be worth the effort. Work on the driver firgure is also under way with intial adjustment to feet and head to fit the cab.

Covering the added exterior details with paint has helped to make the model a little more finished although there is still a lot of work left. I used Vallejo 'Black' to cover bolt heads and profile additions on the frames and an ancient (most likely early 2000's) tin of Humbrol enamel 195 'Dark Green Satin' on the body details fitted. Where I had fitted metal parts I was carefull to prime with enamel paint before the acrylic colour was applied. My experience is that enamel has a stronger 'grip' on bare metal than my favourite acrylic paints.

What a difference a few brush strokes makes! All the exterior detail additions have been painted. The loco will continue to develop in the coming months.

One of my vacation projects actually got finished: the Modelu fox and it even got some publicity on the Modelu Facebook page. The guys at Modelu said nice things about my modelling and provided their audience with a link to this blog. Things like that boost my modelling confidence. Hopefully it will also help the producer to boost sales something we all will benefit from. Notice that I'm no influencer type receiving gifts in return for mentioning producers. My blog is way too obscure and I'm a proud full price paying customer when I shop for my hobby.

My first Modelu animal lifted from the Modelu Facebook page.

More Models in 1/87 Scale

Among my selected summer projects I have been working on some models for a future 1/87 diorama of a yet to be decided Eastern European location. My summer vacation has seen work done on the K-Model TU4 and I have also been cleaning up some Micro_Miners models and experimenting with Soviet concrete wall segments.

Four mine tubs and an overhead loading machine liberated from their web of printing supports before final clean up. Here seen in front of a 1/100 scale Siemens Avenio tram from Majorette. Each tub is 1,5 mm long and the loading machine barely 2 cm.

As described earlier, the Micro_Miners models arrive in small card board boxes on their printing support webs and plate hot glued to bottom of the box. Once released from the box each model or part has to be separated from the printing supports. With small snippits the job is fast over and the few remnants of the supports can be removed with a small file or sanding stick. The two part overhead loading machine was very fragile and I took great care not to damage anything. Despite that one of the brackets keeping the driver's platform on the machine's left side broke. It was quickly reglued with AC-glue.

Four wagons attatched to the bottom of their small card board box with hot glue.

The overhead loading machine's two parts still attached to their frightening maze of print supports.

Equipment from the underground workings of a mine ready for priming.

The mining equipment is planned to feature on a diorama in a Eastern European setting on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Quite where is still undecided but I'm leaning towards one of the three Baltic countries or Ukraine. The narrow gauge mining equipment with 6,5 mm. gauge isn't the main focus, but will add interest and a very clear indication of what's going on next to the 9 mm. gauge railway passing through the industrial location.

Currently I'm sourcing parts that are typical 'Soviet' in style. Despite the Soviet Empire being long gone at the time I'm modelling, buildings and road vehicles are still showing the Soviet legacy. There'll obviously be both Ladas and Zils as well as above the ground steam heating pipes. What is also an absolute must on any ex. Soviet industrial location is the ПО-2 (PO-2) concrete element fence surrounding military barracks, hospital compounds and industrial locations. Read the history of the PO-2 fence in depth here.

While the PO-2 fence is easily available in the military modelling scales 1/76 and 1/35 I had to search long for elements in 1/87. But the German firm PTL-Bahn have them as item 210051 'Betonmauerelemente'. I bought the two remaining bags of 10 elements each from the German trader Modellbahn-Exclusiv allowing me to build a wall 64 cm. long. 

Grouping of items for a future diorama: 750 mm gauge TU4, 600 mm gauge mine equipment and in the rear the ever present PO-2 fencing.

The stuff seen from above on a small piece of foam board testing viewing angles. The future diorama will be much larger.

Nystrup Fox

So far the only animal having been seen around the small gravel line in Nystrup has been a shunting horse. The railway yard wasn't a natural habitat for many larger animals, but a fox or two made regular appearances straying from the nearby forest. That's why I had a pair of foxes in the package from Modelu last time I ordered figures.

Always on guard a fox cautiously approaches the open ground next to the lorry loading ramp. The fox measures 2 cm. over the shoulders and 7 cm. from nose to tail.

The fox from the Modelu set 31101 was intially removed from the maze of printing supports and with a sanding stick I could remove the few attachment points remaining on the figure. A few unnatural looking indentations were filled with model filler. After priming with Games Workshop 'Chaos Black' I stippled on a covering of acryllic paint: Humbril 113 'Rust', Vallejo 818 'Red Leather' 70.983 'Flat Earth' (the paint's name makes you think, doesn't it?) and 70837 'Pale Sand'. The stipple method gives a slightly rough surface and a random application of paint allowing underlaying paint to partially show through. I found it extremely difficult to choose colours for the fox and to add depth to the animal's fur.

Once resonably satisfied with the painting, I added a faded mix of Red Leather and Pale Sand to the fox's upper back and a dry brushing of the rest of the animal. When dry I gave the red areas a wash of heavily diluted rust coloured oil paint. Eyes and mouth were added with black oil paint. Finally the nose was topped off with gloss black paint.

Painting the fox was part of my summer cottage project portfolio accompanying the 1/87 scale TU4 locomotive. 

Something has obviously caught the attention of the fox. It has remained stationary and vigilant for a long time. The workers have left the area so the fox may have found interesting prey?

It's nice to be able to begin adding some of the fine detail to the layout. The fox from Modelu will be moving around on the layout in the future to add a little life.

Summer Modelling TU4

Dedicated followers of this blog will probably recognise the checkered table cloth. A sure sign that I'm vacationing in the cottage and holiday modelling. And that's just what I am! For a change I have brought a 1/87 scale kit to assemble to the best of my abilities. The small size is perfect for bringing away from the house, but the tiny parts are quite challenging. Nevertheless I press on and hope to have the kit more or less finished once my vacation is over.

Assembly of the K-Model's TU4 in resin with etched metal details. I forgot my travel size cutting mat, but in the cottage we're never short of a scrap of wood to use as a substitute. 

The TU4-kit comes without instructions for assembly. Not the biggest of problems as the number of parts is pretty small. It is probably the placing of the tiny etched metal parts where the missing instructions will annoy me the most. The kit supplies parts for a static loco only and I'm keeping the model that way. No experiments with tiny H0e mechanisms this time!

TU4 bogies with wheels and gauge adjusting shims fitted. A small casting fault on one flange probably won't be noticed once the model is fitted on a small diorama. 

I began by sanding away flash on the parts from the frame and bogies. I then AC-glued the front skirts to the frame part and test fitted a pair of wheels on the stub axles on a bogie casting. The gauge didn't quite match 9 mm so I drilled and cut four shims to add on the axle subs. As I was away from my stash of all sorts of plasticcard pieces I couldn't find a piece thin enough to add on both sides of the bogie. The obtain a decent fit in the track, the shims were placed crosswise on each bogie. Once the bogie sides were superglued on bogie assembly incl. wheels I drilled chassis and bogies for M2 bolts for safe and flexible mounting. This will allow for realistically posing the loco on both curved and straight H0e track.

Two models from K-Model next to each other. The TU4 is still mostly unglued and only assembled to test how the major parts fit. The TU4 is 88 mm over the frame ends, while the PD-1 is 75 mm over the buffers. My 1/19 Baguley-Drewry is wider than the TU4 is long. Must get a photo of them together!

After removing flash from the upper body I closed the openings from cab to the two bonnets and installed very a rudimentary instrument panel. It's built from plasticcard and I'm not claiming any accuracy as it's all built from pictures showing only part of the construction. Not much will be seen through the windows anyway. The cab interior was primed and then brush painted a medium grey.

As I had the black primer out, I primed the bogies as well and brush painted them dark grey with wheels being given a layer of rust colour.

It's beginning to look like a TU4. It looks like I will have to build a gear box protruding down between the air tanks.

I have been working out the remaining assembly and painting process and next is some major work on the body. The upper body will be glued to the frames. A range of small parts must be attached, mostly photo etched parts of a frightening small size. Very interesting work coming up!

Landscaping Near Building

Long time followers of this blog will know that I like to model outside. Sometimes out in the open while the barbeque heats up or when weather and type of modelling project makes sense. During the last few weeks one of the two segments making up my Nystrup Gravel layout has been sitting on a pair of trestles under the roof of my double carport. A convenient place for many things (We usually only park the car there during winter). I haven't spent long evenings modelling, but 10 minutes here and there adds up.

Outdoor modelling in the carport a warm summer evening. I'm adding grass tufts in the point to the left as preparation for ballasting.

I have primarily been adding grass to the rear of the layout and around the relief building, building a wooden floor to the entrance area of the large wooden building and ballasting a point. I added static grass with my RTS Greenkeeper. Besides getting a tolerable cover of light green grass on the layout up against the backscene, I experimented with adding another layer of static grass on top of the first. I want part of the layout covered in tall thin grass and having the 12 mm static grass fibres stand 'on top' of each other creates visibly higher grass cover. Not 24 mm but recognizably higher than 12 mm. Detailed study of the results once the glue has fully dried will determine if the method works for me.

Adding static grass near the relief building and flooring at the entrance. The still wet glue is visible in the upper left corner.

Since the large wooden relief building was placed on the layout in 2022, I have wanted to add a wooden floor in the large entrance door. Not that much is visible when the layout sits in its usual place in my workshop/library, but I like that type of detail for close up viewing or photography. The floor was built from scraps of wood and some coffee stirring sticks coloured with dark grey stain dissolved in tap water. The scraps were used as a foundation to build up the floor area and correct length stirring sticks then glued down as visible flooring. A little gravel to make a smooth transition between floor and ballast as well as some light weathering finished off the work..

The complete flooring placed in the door opening of the large wooden building. Just some weathering before it's finished. The slight gap in the building's backplate over the floor can't be seen when the layout is installed in the workshop/library room.

Wood stain was applied carefully to keep the colour on the light and faded side. 

With the layout segment set up easily accessible from all sides in the carport I finally got round to ballast the first turnout on the layout. My last session with ground covering work had reached the turnout, where quite a lot of work had to be done. When I laid the track on the layout in 2021 I rebuilt the standard Peco points with wooden sleepers. For a minimum of risk I decided to keep the plastic sleepers in the frog section. To achieve some kind of uniformity between wooden and plastic sleepers the black Peco sleepers recieved a layer of acrylic medium grey paint and a thin wash of raw umber oil paint before any other work started. My layout is built from light materials and due to the plastic sleepers' height a lot of ballast would be necessary potentially challenging my idea of a light layout. As a weight saving measure I added strips of left over 2.5 mm foamboard between the sleepers. This allows me to use a much thinner layer of sieved gravel to achieve a realistic ballast profile - and keep the layout comparatively light. Before ballasting I added a number of grass tufts in the track. I ballast my track in the old fashioned way of adding gravel dry, adjusting it with a soft brush and then flooding the ballast with a thin mix of water, PVA glue and washing up liquid.

Close-up of a Peco turnout partly rebuilt with wooden sleepers. For a minimum of risk I kept the plastic sleepers in the frog section. The sleepers are painted medium grey with a thin wash of raw umber oil paint. 

As a weight saving measure I'm inserting scrap pieces of foamboard between the sleepers. The Peco plastic sleepers are higher than the wooden sleepers in the hand built track, requiring more ballast. Ballast weighs a lot in 1/19 scale and the light foamboard acts as a filler saving weight.

Ballasting in progress. The ballast to the right has just been flooded with a mix of tap water and white glue. The dry ballast center has been roughly levelled with a brush and will now be dressed with a mix of small stones before being glued.

With the layout back in its usual place I could enjoy a layout with two thirds of the surface covered with a kind of realistic cover rather than the painted kitchen rags that have making up the surface for far too long. Maybe the layout will be completely covered (not finished!) by year's end?

The left end of the layout is soon looking like more like a semi-finished model railway than the naked landscape of painted kitchen rags. Still a lot to do adding more vegetation and small details.

In this view from the newly ballasted turnout the wooden building towers over the small train. Just as it is supposed to!

My vacation is fast approaching and I will probably be taking a small modelling project or two with me in our summer cottage. If I will make any progress remains to be seen.

Terrible Modelling

This is not about terrible modelling quality, but of modelling a terrible prototype: Human beings being gassed to death in a death camp. The model is not just any model, but a model exhibited in the Auschwitz I concentration camp near Krakow in Poland. The model is built to illustrate the process of assembly, undressing, killing and cremating over 1 mio (in Auschwitz alone!) Jews and people that the Nazi regime didn't like. A broad group of e.g. homosexuals, communists, trade unionists, Soviet POWs, Romas and mentally ill, but primarily Jews. 

In white the whole industrial killing facility is understated and the figures are anonymous. Yet it is easy to imagine yourself and your family waiting at the entrance of the undressing room. A pile of Zyklon B pellets is located in front of the diorama.  

How anyone has picked up strength to build a detailed model of the underground undressing room and gas chamber filled with struggling and dying humans is beyond my grasp. The cut-away building showing the crematorium is almost peacefully horrific compared to the other two heartbreakingly gruesome scenes. 

The diorama is L-shaped measuring approximately 8 by 5 meters. Scale is 1/15 and the diorama contains more than 300 full figures and even more modelled in relief and half hidden in the depths of the constructions. The figures may be partly built from commercial parts, but most are individually made and posed (as far as I could see through watery eyes).

I have mentioned historic models and dioramas before and the Auschwitz diorama is probably the most terrible model I have ever seen. No builder is mentioned on the display, but the modeller is Mieczyslaw Stobierski, who made the large diorama in 1948 for the Auschwitz Museum. Much later three copies of the diorama were made for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, and the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem. On this website a detailed description of the diorama can be found. 

At the 'Neue Judenrampe' at Birkenau a single G10 goods wagon stands as a symbol of the thousands of railway wagon that brought people from all directions in the German occupied territories to KZ and death camps.

Apart from the museum at Auschwitz I, I also visited the huge Auschwitz II (Birkenau) extermination camp. Despite have read a lot about the location, I hadn't imagined the size to be so overwhelmingly large. I think that only a visit can truely give an impression of the utter evil committed here.

If you have the chance, visit the Auschwitz Museum. It's a terrible experience, but sometimes that is just what is needed to beef up one's humanity - so easily being chipped away by fake news and confrontational social media.

TU7 and Closed Goods Wagons in 1/87 Scale

The packages from Ukraine keeps arriving, bringing my supplies for a little diorama of a mining location in Eastern Europe to new levels. This time I shopped at Retro Trains Models in Kryvyi Rih in the Donetsk region. The order took no more than a week and a half to travel from Eastern Ukraine to Denmark. Parcels from the UK often have longer shipping time.

Two goods wagons, a TU7 and a Tomytec drive unit have arrived on my work table.

RTM produce high quality resin kits of 1520 mm standard gauge Ukrainian locomotives (that would be broad gauge to us) as well as an expanding series of narrow gauge loco and rolling stock. The level of detail is quite high and the TU7 kit has more parts than my 1/19 Lister (even when counting all the parts I added myself). I think that illustrates the level of detail possible in the RTM kits. If I will manage to apply all those very tiny parts neatly remains to be seen!

Data sheet of a TU7A. Despite being in Russian, most railway enthusiasts should be able to interpret the info and see that this is not a tiny narrow gauge locomotive. 

The TU7 type was developed in 1971/72 at the Kambarka Engineering Works to replace the company's older 750 mm gauge locomotive types TU4 and TU2. The type is still in production at Kambarka, although in an updated version (TU7A) introduced in 1986. The production of TU7 reached well over 3000 units and several hundred were exported to e.g. Cuba and Vietnam. The TU7 was designed for use on on gauges ranging from 750 mm to 1435 mm and standard gauge. Cuba received standard gauge TU7s while the Vietnamese ones were 1000 mm. Like the TU4s at Western European heritage lines, a TU7 has also found its way west, as the 603 mm gauged Brecon Mountain Railway in Wales acquired TU7-1698 from Latvia in 2010. The TU7 is a versatile construction fitting in on railways with gauges varying from 600 to 1435 mm gauge! 

TU7 at Tver Construction Material, 180 km northeast of Moscow. As usual the gauge is 750 mm. Photo: Ilja Semonof.

The RTM TU7 is a resin kit with a high level of detail and designed to fit on the Tomytec TM-21. While the recently bought TU4 will be a static model the Tomytec drive unit will enable me to build a functional locomotive. 

A simple design with single end cab. Fault free casting with no flash at all. Test assembly of a few major parts shows a perfect fit. 

Well packed kit with an impressive decal sheet.

To accompany the TU4 and TU7 a few wagons was in order and I selected two closed goods wagons built by Demikhovo Engineering Works (Демиховский Машиностроительный Завод, ДМЗ) in Demikhov near Moscow. The plant was founded in the Soviet Union in the 1930's building machines for the peat industri including bogie hoppers by the thousands. Today the company is Russia's main producer of EMU's. The prototype goods wagons seems to be a type built from 1965 and into the 1980's with a load capacity of 20 t. From photographs and a single drawing the RTM kit looks very close to prototype. As the TU7 kit the wagons have lots of fiddly parts and a high level of detail.  

The RTM kit's upper body test fitted on the combined frame and floor part. A rather long 750 mm gauge goods wagon, but still a quite small model (compared to what I usually build).

The sudden investment i H0e models of Soviet prototypes is not a sign of a change of scale, but merely meant to be an enjoyable side show allowing me to model another field of interest in a much smaller scale. The Nystrup Gravel project moves on in its usual slow pace hampered by the usual time limiting factors of life (not that I'm complaining). This week I have been working (10 minutes or something) on track detailing before adding vegetation and ballast. 

Close-up of a Peco point partly rebuilt with wooden sleepers. As I rebuilt the two points, the frog sections kept their plastic sleepers. On one of the points the sleepers have now received a layer of medium grey paint. The upper right part has also had a thin wash of raw umber oil paint. Further weathering will hopefully help the plastic sleepers to blend into the rest of the hand built track on the layout.