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Building an European Railcar Part 2 – The Design

Last time, I spoke about how to start modeling a typical European style goods railcar. I have been speaking at length about all kind of fancy ways of making sure you understand your prototype. I hope you have been making notes because today we will immediately dive into the fun part: Building! Let’s just take off where we left now, shall we?

Step 4. Choosing your materials

After the scale has been set, it’s time to decide which part will be essential for your design. This might sound silly, but in my opinion every train model has 1 defining part (or technique, meaning several parts combined) around which the whole model is being build. In this case, I settled on the Lego Chair in brown, since I had a lot of them and wanted to get rid of them without selling. Also, the idea was that brown would nicely mimick the rust on the prototype (And trust me, some of them were far worse off than the one you just saw). Turning them into a railcar seemed to be the right solution. It didn’t work out as planned however…

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Building an European Railcar Part 1 – The Prototype

As I already said in an earlier post, I’m a big fan of railcars and I do believe they should get more attention. Locomotives are nice, but when they can’t haul a big rake of railcars, they just look silly, if you ask me. In the end, a locomotive is meant to pull railcars, not run around looking all nice and shiny.

However, I know it’s difficult to pull off a nice railcar, because in the end, they are all quite boring, definitely when it comes to goods railcars. By accident, I have been documenting my last railcar build pretty well, so I thought it could be interesting to share. This will be a three-parter with three easy topics: 1. The Prototype, 2. The Build and 3. The Bragging. However, let’s start at square one, OK?

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