Container Flats and Ballasting

Following last weekend's overdosing on Model Railways, this weekend was much more sedate.  On Friday night I got an urge to build some 40’ container flat racks with wire cage ends.  I’m not sure of the correct name of these are, but I found a few photos on the web, particularly on http://wagonfreak.blogspot.com.au/ blogsite by Wagonfreak.  So after lunch on Saturday I went down to the shed and grabbed a commercial 40’ container as a template for the base of my 40’ containers.  I built my container bases from a 2mm styrene sheet with 2mm evergreen styrene channel section on each side.  I also built up some gate sections from 1.2mm styrene rod and 1mm styrene rod and the cross pieces were made from 0.025" styrene rod.    As usually happens when I start building something from styrene, I ran out of 2mm Channel and 0.025" styrene rod.  So it will be off to the hobby shop next Saturday to get some off Ray.

After a while I went down to the Shed and whipped out my trusty spray can and gave two containers a base spray.  They look quite good.  I now need to identify what wagons they will be assigned to on the layout.  I did make a third container flat, but it needs the cross bracing from 0.025" styrene which I don't have enough of.

The first 40' container flat with cage wire end.

The second 40' container flat with a different cage wire end.

Not content to potter around in the shed, I decided to apply some ballast to a couple of sections of track just inside the shed door.  These were applied and spread out by my trusty soft brush.  Basically the ballast was only spread around from the road overbridge show below to just out of view to the right.  Two different colours were used to depict a freshly ballasted section on the track.

The two loops of track from Grafton Yard are seen above.  Grafton Yard is located by following the track on the bottom right another 1.5 metres around the curve, and off to the left and heading around the spiral we get to a tunnel mouth and then re-appear at the other end of Rocla Sleeper Siding and on the inner loop about 4 inches higher.

A close up view of the point into the Rocla Sleeper Siding.  Just seen in this view are the gates on the road entrance to Rocla and the gates on the rail entrance.  Yes they work!

So today, I made a cardboard shape to fit around the point motor and then applied some more ballast here.  That was followed by wetting the ballasted sections with my spray bottle and then dropping diluted aquadhere onto the ballast.  I think it came up quite well.  I don't have any photos of the after view as yet.  Following wetting and applying the glue the ballast gets a lot darker until it dries off a bit, when it does go a bit lighter, but nowhere near it is in the above shots.

I also spent some time gluing some wooden sleepers into a track crossing at the end of Cassino Platform.