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.