Games, Trains and Automobiles

Earlier this year I wrote a post about converting a Lledo ‘Days Gone’ die cast van to make it suitable for games set in the Far East. It was a small project that I really enjoyed and so it inspired me to look around for a few more Lledo trucks. I have in mind the sorts of vehicles you might see in industrial settings near docks and warehouses in Shanghai, Hong Kong or Singapore. At this stage they're not intended to serve any specific gaming purpose other than being scatter terrain to help bring a table to life. 

I picked up a few more trucks on eBay, taking care to make sure they were ones that came close to 1/72 scale. 

Having downloaded the jpeg files for the liveries from the Major Thomas Foolery blog all I needed to do was repaint and apply the decals to transform them into the sorts of vehicles I wanted. I covered the process for doing this in more detail in this earlier post if you're interested in seeing more.

In a similar vein I've been looking for a suitable locomotive for a railway. I bought six railway carriages very cheaply several years ago and since then I've been keeping an eye out for a cheap locomotive. It didn't have to be in working order and you will occasionally see 'non-runners' for sale at reasonable prices on eBay, but I wasn't successful. In the end I opted to make one of the Dapol plastic kits. It was more work than I was looking for, but sometimes it's refreshing to build a model that's slightly different from usual. So it was with this. These kits were first released in the 1950s by Kitmaster. The moulds later went to Airfix and are now with Dapol. Despite their age they hold up remarkably well.

I have in mind using this as either scatter terrain for a city or industrial setting (for example, those dockyards in the Far East with the die cast trucks), or as the target for partisan or Chindit games. I think it has enough of a generic steam locomotive look that it should work in most theatres. At this point I should confess that I have no knowledge of trains, so I suspect that's the equivalent of telling a tank enthusiast that a model of a Tiger II looks enough like a 'generic' tank that it can work for any army in any theatre. Quelle horreur!

While I was making it my wife walked past and said, a little surprised, 'ooh you're making choo choo trains now'. No sooner had she said it, she stopped, pulled a face and said rather bashfully, "I can't believe I just called that a choo choo train". A revealing slip of the tongue. Talking to me like I'm a little child clearly says much about how she views the hobby!

Every train needs a station and this is a small MDF model that could work in a number of settings in the Far East but also in North Africa or the Mediterranean. 

The inspiration for the station came from this picture of a pre-war station in Malaya.

I replaced the roof on the MDF model with a sheet of plastic pantiles and rendered the walls with filler. 

The lights were made by converting railway yard lamps and the other extras came from an Italeri set of architectural elements. While it's hard to escape that MDF laser cut look I think anything that breaks away from perpendicular angles and straight lines helps to avoid that.