Auhagen Platz (2)

I've spend a great day making some good progress on the 'Plattenbau' today.
At the left the state of the building this morning. Nothing was changed to the original Auhagen kit at this stage, except for glueing two kits together of course. I painted the kit with ocre and light grey acrylics, followed by a wash with black ink. A concrete effect was achieved by lightly brushing some grey/brownish pastel powder (easily made rubbing pastels over sandpaper) on top. The window frames got a similar treatment. A coat of matt varnish finishes this stage.

Where the window frames look quite good, the original door (at the right) is a different story. It's just too course and there's no frame around it. So I used a door from a Faller kit, which was shortened in hight a little to fit.
I also made steps from styrene plate because the ones provided in the kit are too high for N scale. Using those daily would be a good exercise for the residents though ;)

Next up: the roof. I replaced the Auhagen roof with one made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet. Strips of pre-coloured sandpaper were glued on top to simulate roofing felt. I have purchased an 'industrial building detailing set' from Artitec a while ago, which is a great source for roof details. I used a rather large aircon unit, a metal chimney and some flat thing (access to the roof?).
I accidentally spilt some white paint on the roof, but decided it could stay there because it could as well have been done by an N scale painter doing the roof edges ;)

And the result! It still needs some glazing and perhaps I'll even add light and an interior at a later stage, but the Plattenbau-look is there! The green Trabant adds to the DDR feel.
I think the Auhagen kit is a great starting point for making bigger apartment buildings like this one. It's very versatile and combining kits is just so easy! Here's  another example of Plattenbauten made with these kits, very cleverly turning some elements to make the building wider.

T7B5 from Oslo (2)

Lileau residents are very happy with the arrival of the new Oslo tram in the city.
Shorty after the arrival of the transport from the Czech Republic, the T7B5 was spotted doing test runs. The opinion of both staff and onlookers: A great gain for the city!

Read more about the model and prototype in a previous post.

Tomytec Kumamoto 9700

Tomytec will be releasing a model of the Kumamoto City 9700 series articulated tram in march 2011.
Like the previously released Portram/ Centram the shell fits on the TM-LRT01 powered chassis. Two colours will be available, early livery (white/light blue) and late livery (white/black).

Introduced in 1997, the 9700 series were the first low-floor trams in Japan. I think they have quite a European look, as they were build in Japan under license from German manufacturer Adtranz.

Become a member of the Tomix Yahoo Group to get more news like this first hand!

Lighting up

These streetlights are very cheap ones from Hong Kong (eBay, 10 for under € 10,-, and free shipping as well!) but I think they look quite okay on the little layout.
The wiring is nothing fancy, I just connected them to two AA batteries, which are hidden inside the module. A little switch turns them on. I chose to go for battery power because the tiny LED's will probably last almost forever on a battery charge and it keeps connecting modules in the future very simple.

I'm really enjoying this stage of construction in which the city gets more and more alive with every detail added.

And my T7B5 should be arriving shortly! Looking forward to running it. Hope to get some more track in soon as well, so I can start on the turning loops. Then the enjoyment of watching the trams go by can really begin :)

Tram stop construction

Got these really nice street fences from Sankei today. Sankei (from Japan) makes high quality laser cut paper models and various interesting details like these fences. The figures are from Preiser.

Auhagen 14464

Got this kit at the local hobby shop today. It contains two 4 storey 50's/60's German apartment buildings. The design is generic enough to make them useable almost anywhere in the world.
The kit comes with a white/greyish and a light yellow building, but the rather shiny plastic definately needs a coat of paint.
German manufacturers have a good habit of casting the window frames seperately, which always makes the painting process a lot easier. Also nice: all side walls in the kits are moulded together.

It's not the most detailed kit but it's cheap (€ 16,-) and has a big plus: it's completely modular, you can build the buildings any way you want really. The builings can get a tiled roof or a flat roof, fitted with balconies or without, the ground floor layout can be changed, and the best of all: buildings can stacked on top of eachother and multiple kits can be combined.

I really like this modular approach. This is my first Auhagen kit and I must say I'm pleasantly surprised, looking forward to building it!


A couple examples:

Ah, and the alcoholics were on sale :)

Croncrete slabs and rusty masts (2)

As promised in my last post, some more pictures. I have been unable to use any pictures made with my mobile phone, so I took some afterwards. These don't show all stages of building, sorry about that.

The catenary masts. I decided to go for non-functioning overhead for now. In the future these masts can be easily replaced with live wire ones, as the masts are attached to bolts wich slot in holes in the track plates. This also makes replacing a damaged mast very easy.
The base was made from 2mm dia styrene tube, with a drilled hole in which the 1.2mm dia brass tube fits. The 0.5mm brass wire was soldered to the tube. Some insulation from electric wire finishes the mast. I sprayed the whole mast a light grey colour, and then painted the wire-hanging parts black with a little drybrushed rusty colour. After all, Lileau community isn't spending much on maintenance ;)

The track, before and after. Tomix Wide Tram Track is really easy to use but I don't like the shiny rails and plastic. These had to be re-painted. The inside of the flangeways were brushed dark brown (be careful to whipe excess paint off the rails afterwards). I didn't paint the rail joiners and last centimeter of the pieces before joining them together to ensure electric conductivity. When dry, the rails and flangeways were masked and the plates sprayed concrete colour. A light wash of black ink and voilà! Washing all pieces seperately makes the tramway look very lively.

The zebra crossing is a rub-on decal from (I believe) a Busch set. To get some of the whiteness and shine away, I gave the crossing some local weathering after applying.

This picture also shows the top of the M4 bolts the masts have been attached to. They look a little big, but I've seen examples of these in real life so I'm not that bothered about them.

By the way, the platforms aren't glued down yet, this will be fixed soon.

Concrete slabs, rusty masts and brand new Combino's

I've tackled two jobs this weekend: making overhead masts (design based more or less on these) and painting the tram track.
I would like to show some of the process, but I'm having trouble uploading pictures from my mobile phone to blogger, so you'll have to do with this picture of the results for now.
Will upload some pictures of the work in progress when I have figured out the problem.

By the way, really looking forward to the release of Modemo's Combino. Some mouthwatering pictures of the prototype can be found here.

My little collection :)

Fresh tram news

From N-Gauge Information:
In spring 2011, Tomytec will be releasing a model of the 2000 series tram in Kyoto and Matsushima liveries. If I understand it correctly, a new chassis is being developed for this tram, which will be adjustable in lenght. This would make it great news for modelers, definately worth following!

And then there's also news from Modemo. Plans are to develop a model of a 5000 series Hiroshima 'Green Mover' LRV, a Siemens Combino. The tram will have a flywheel and working head and tail lights. A model which will undoubtedly look good on many European layouts as well.

Good modeltramnews just keeps coming these days :)

Some (new) products

A couple of N scale tram-related products I recently learned about:

New from GHB International is this model of a Birney Streetcar, in the double truck variety. Prices of this nice model start at $ 39,- for an unpainted shell and $ 59,- for a motorized model, add $ 16,- for a working trolley pole. A painted model will cost $ 20,- extra per colour. But for that, you can get the model in any livery you like. I'm shure this model will find its way to many US trolley layouts!

Finescale und mehr does these brass N gauge tram rails, both in a NEM (=N standard) and finescale variety. A package costs € 23,-, which is enough to make a meter of track. Not a bad price! Note: the cobble stones have to be ordered separately.

Speaking of tram track, Tomix Wide Tram Track is slowly becoming available in online stores. Hobby Search lists the following items at the moment:
0113 - Rail Joiners
1790 - 140mm straight 2x
1790 - 70mm straight 2x
1796 - R140 curves, 2x 30 degrees, 2x 60 degrees
1797 - R177 curves, 2x 30 degrees, 2x 60 degrees
91085 Mini rail basic set
91086 Super Mini oval set

T7B5 from Oslo: A unique prototype

On the Japanese Modelling & Japan Rail Enthousiasts Forum I read about Michal from the Czech Republic who has build an impressive collection of mainly Eastern-European and German trams in N scale. I think he has done a great job on his models, like various ČKD Tatra types as the T6A5 the KT4, the Polish Konstal 105N and the German KSW tram (which is also produced by Kato), all etched in 0.3 mm brass. He even sells most of them, both as a kit or build (some even motorized) on his website. Interesting for US modellers: Michal also does a Škoda 10 T, which runs in Portland, Oregon and Tacoma, Washington.
If you click on kolejiště, you see some pictures of Michals very cleverly designed tram layout.

My eyes fell on this little tram. It's a ČKD Tatra type T7B5, a uni-directional tram. The livery is quite unusual because it's that of Oslo Sporveier, the Norwegian capital's public transport authority. Only one was ever purchased for Oslo, which was actually the only Tatra ever to run in Scandinavia, or even the whole of Western Europe!

I like both Eastern-European and Scandinavian prototypes so I just had to place an order for one of these, which will be powered using a Tomix TM 03 chassis. Can't wait for it to arrive! :)

The Tatra T7B5 was never a successfull series. Only a handfull were build at the end of the 80's, mainly for Moscow. Oslo Sporveier, at that time, was looking for a replacement for its old Høka cars. One of the original two prototypes was shipped to Oslo for testing, after it got a new interior and paint job.
The order finally went to Ansaldo/Firema, who build 32 articulated low-floor trams, the SL95 series.

The T7B5 was used for a couple of years, after which it was converted into a party tram. The tram was shipped to the Swedish city of Göteborg in 1998, where it kept being a party tram in its blue Olso livery. It's believed to be still there, although not in service any more.

German tram from France

The newest addition to my European tram fleet is this model from Arnold. It represents the Düwag 6-axle tram as they were used in the 80's and early 90's in the French city of Lille. The trams were purchased second-hand from Germany as a temporary solution for operating Lille's dated tramway system before major modernization in 1991-1994, after which new lightrail vehicles from Breda took over. On their arrival in France the Düwags got this flashy TCC (Lille community public transport) livery.
Click here for a nice video of these trams in action.

The two now still existing tramway lines in Lille were opened 1909. The line starts in the city center, and then branches off to Tourcoing, while the main line continues to Roubaix. The system was named after its engineer, Alfred Mongy. Mongy was quite ahead of his time, as the double-track lines were placed in the center of the boulevards, not having to share their right-of-way with other traffic. Probably the reason why these lines are still there nowadays, fuctioning side-to-side with Lille's VAL, and have not been closed down like in so many other French cities. Read more about the Mongy's history.

Tight radius stress

After a recent discussion on the Yahoo N scale traction group about minimum radius curves for N scale trams, I thought it would be a good idea to make a list of trams which make it through a 103mm radius (the tightest commercially available) and which ones won't. Test location was my little layout-to-be. It turns out that all trams make it through really, but the Bachmann PCC and Arnold Düwag are quite noisy, which indicates stress on the gears. Definately not healthy in the long run. And especially the Arnold is a little too expensive to ruin this way...

No problems with 103mm radius:
Kato 'pocket line' tram chassis
Kato 'shorty' 4 axle chassis
Tomytec LRV chassis (Portram, Centram etc.)
Bachmann Brill trolley

Noisy on 103 mm radius:
Bachmann PCC
Arnold Düwag (and a little smelly as well...)

This really makes me think about using 140mm as a minimum for future layouts.

And another new model!

According to Kato's production scedule this cute little tram should be available soon. Apparently, Kato is re-releasing their Pocket Line series, giving it a fresh new look here and there. The toy-like model could be an interesting base for kitbash projects. Unfortunately, it uses the 2-axle tram chassis, which is not know for its good performances, but then again, the retail price is just under €30,-!

A new tram from Bachmann?

Rumour has it that Bachmann will release a completely new model in N scale, the Peter Witt streetcar. Apparently, the model comes DCC equipped, at a price of about $ 140,-. I'm not that familiar with American traction, but I definately like the looks of this tram! See a picture of the model here.

Join the N scale traction group to discuss this subject!

CENTRAM (2)

And they are out! Tomytec's Tetsudou Collection CENTRAM model appears to be another gem. The motorized model is available for little under €50,-. A bargain for such a great running tram. The CENTRAM is available in white, silver and black.

Available on eBay through Plaza Japan.

A peach from Tomytec

A little package from Plaza Japan arrived today. It contained this beautiful model of the Okayama Railway 9200 series ´Momo´ (which means peach in Japanese) from the Tomytec Tetsudou Collection. Like the previously released PORTRAM´s, the tram body easily slides onto a TM/LRT01 chassis, making it an excellent runner. No problem at all with turnouts and tight curves.

The body is coloured light grey (a little metallic even, or is that just the light reflection?), making it, at least in my opinion, a more appealing model than the PORTRAM. It doesn't have such a clean look. I really like the livery it comes in, which was designed by the famous Japanse designer Eiji Mitooka. The biggest difference with the PORTRAM is the extra door at the rear end. This makes the tram more convincing for right-hand traffic.

I think the front also looks a lot better. I has many nice details. Especially the headlights stand out. Pantograph and roof details are identical to the PORTRAM.

I'm sure this model will be a real eye-catcher on any N scale tram layout. At least it will be on mine :)

A tram with issues

The newest addition to my German tram fleet is this lovely little Kato model. I think it looks great next to the Arnold Düwag. Despite its looks the performances are... well disappointing. The model can't make it a single time around the layout without stalling. Adding some lead helped a little, but still it doesn't negotiate the turnouts gracefully. I think the solution will be to convert the tram to overhead power, but that will have to wait untill later. For now she just has to stand there and  be pretty :)

CENTRAM

And they keep coming, those Tomytec Tetsudou collection trams! To be released this month are three new 'CENTRAM' units, which, in real life, operate on a very short loop line in central Toyama. Available colours will be white, silver and black. Like other Tomytec trams, these come as display models, which can be motorized using the TN-LRT01 chassis.