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.

A Tale of Two Tigers

While I wouldn't call myself a collector I do have a tendency to be a completist, which explains why several years ago I bought a box of two "E-Z Build" Tiger II kits from Pegasus Hobbies. I was building the German force for games using Chain of Command and naturally I wanted to be prepared to cover all eventualities. Makes sense? Well it does if you're a completist, but two Tiger IIs, was that really necessary? After all this is for a platoon level skirmish game. How often is one Tiger II, let alone two, going to turn up in one of those?

Sensing I may have made a purchase too far the models remained unmade in their box. In fact they did so for so long that when I had a chance to do a bit of a clear out for a bring & buy event at a local convention I thought it was probably time to let them go. Well, as it turned out, no one else shared my enthusiasm for two Tiger IIs in 1/72 scale. The box was one of very few items that didn't sell. No matter, it was returned to the stash.

Fast forward to December 2021 and I download the pdf of the most recent Lard Magazine. I'm pleased to see there is much in it that interests me including two campaigns for Chain of Command. One of which, Bazooka Town, is set in 1945 and I can hardly believe my eyes when I see that the campaign includes provision for the Germans to have a force with....wait for it....two Tiger IIs. Well, how fortunate is that? Cue a hunt in the stash to see if I still have that Pegasus box with the Tigers, which I do. I don't know if I'll ever get around to playing the campaign (although it is appealing), but suddenly here was the incentive I needed to make up those two models.

Being quick build kits they are short on detail but I've kept things simple and the only addition is a tank commander from AB for one of them.

I decided to paint them in a late war tri-tonal ambush camouflage scheme. I'll often do the tri-tone colours using the airbrush freehand, as I've done with the PzIV below.

However this time I wanted the camouflage to have a hard edge. For this I make a mask using Silly Putty which I find does an excellent job and is easily removed without lifting any of the paintwork. 

The dots for the ambush scheme were applied afterwards using a paintbrush.

I use a filter of a pale yellow oil paint to fade the colours and tie them together. I then do all my usual weathering. Overall I think they've come out well considering the simplicity of the kits.

Now the story doesn't end there, that would be too easy. The Germans are fighting the Americans and while I have a good collection of US vehicles the campaign has support options that include a M26 Pershing and a M36 Jackson tank destroyer. I didn't have either one of those. I hardly need to tell you how this one ends other than to say a couple of packages came through the post not long after.

The Pershing is a kit from Trumpeter. They have more detail than the quick-build ones from Pegasus and involve a bit more time putting together but the reward is a more attractive finished model. If there is a downside it's that they use rubber tracks which are not as robust for gaming as hard plastic ones. The crew figure is from AB.

The M36 Jackson is from Armourfast. Like Pegasus these are quick build and lacking in detail but I find adding extras like crew and stowage can really make a difference. Once again the crew for this one comes from AB Figures.

While I was working on those two I took the opportunity to finish off another American tank destroyer that had been sitting half completed since last year. This one is the M18 Hellcat built on the Chaffee chassis and is also from Armourfast, with crew once again from AB.

So I guess there's a moral in here somewhere, although I'm not sure exactly what it is - never get rid of anything, you'll only regret it later? Buy things even when you can't see a use for them, because hey, you never know when you might? If you buy one thing it will lead you down a rabbit hole that will involve buying more? I suspect the answer is probably all of the above but, if nothing else, at least I've satisfied the completist in me. 

When you need a break from painting figures

The workbench has been full of figures in recent months while the paint queue of tanks, AFVs and guns hasn't been getting any shorter. So the last couple of weeks have seen the paintbrushes given a rest and the airbrush put back into action. It's been time to finish off several 20mm Second World War projects.

I have several of the Plastic Soldier Company boxed sets of vehicles and I don't always need all three of the models for the same force, which means I can do them in a number of different paint schemes. One of those I had in mind was using spare allied vehicles for lend-lease tanks used by the Red Army.

The first batch include a Valentine and a Sherman (M4A2) from the Plastic Soldier Company and a Matilda from S-Models. PSC do a set of Red Army decals that have come in very handy for this project. Crew figures are from AB Figures.

While not lend-lease vehicle I had a Dragon T34/85 which I've made and intend to eventually populate with tank riders from the lovely AB set (they are primed and waiting paint), in the meantime the tank itself was painted while I had the airbrush loaded with Russian green. All my other T34s are from PSC and the Dragon kit has lots of much finer detail that may make it a little more brittle for gaming but nonetheless a very attractive looking kit.

A much neglected part of my collection has been soft skins vehicles and that's something I'm starting to address for several of my forces. First up has been a few trucks from the PSC German truck set. An Opel Blitz and Opel Maultier and then a Mercedes truck which was built from left over parts from the truck set and a bit of scratch building.

Talking of transport, I've also added this unmotorised version - three mules and their handlers from the 172 Miniatures Japanese range.

Another fairly recent addition for the Japanese is a 47mm anti-tank gun and crew. This is from SHQ. I often find their figures on the slim side compared to the others I use but when used like this in a gun crew and not side by side with the others you can barely notice the difference. 

Armourfest at the Australian Armour and Artillery Museum (part 2)

With so much to see at the museum I've decided to break it down into a couple of posts, if you missed the first one which looks at much of the German and Soviet equipment on display you can find it here.

For this post I'm going to focus on AFVs from the western allies - the US, Britain and Australia. Despite the number of Sherman tanks that were built it's not a tank that seems to garner a lot of interest. Now a Panther or a Tiger, that's a very different matter, but the Sherman which served on almost every front and in the armies of the US, Britain, the USSR and China seems much neglected by comparison.

I've seen the M4A4 as well as the Firefly version, so it was good to have a first look at an M4A1 with a cast hull.

The museum also has a running Sherman Firefly.

One of the ironies of Armourfest was that the Sherman, probably one of the most reliable of the Second World War vehicles on display, was the only tank to have a breakdown. So much so that it was returned to the workshops and we didn't have the chance to see it again.

Nice to see a Churchill MkVII here as well.

The museum has several US-made tanks that served in various allied armies. They have two M3 Stuarts. The early version has an impressive array of machine guns - a co-axial, a bow and two mounted in sponsons on either side of the hull. 

They also have a running M3A1, a later model that can be distinguished by the rounded turret (and the removal of the two sponson mounted machine guns). 

The final stage of the tank's evolution is the M5A1, which the museum also has in its collection.

The M3 Grant/Lee was used by the Australian 1st Armoured Division but never in combat. While they were replaced in most theatres with the arrival of the Sherman, they continued to see use by the British against Japan in places like Burma. The museum has a Grant version.

And a Lee.

The later war is also covered with a Chaffee light tank and a Pershing.

The Pershing mounts the powerful 90mm gun which was also used on the M36 Jackson tank destroyer, another of the running vehicles in the museum collection.

Perhaps a little more unusual is the British Archer self propelled anti tank gun with a 17 pounder mounted on a Valentine chassis.

Talking of the Valentine there is also the original tank version in the collection.

The Valentine, like the British Matilda soon became obsolete for the European theatre but both found a use in the Pacific right through until the end of the war.

There is a good selection of armoured transport from a LVT-4 Buffalo.

To the impressively imposing LVT(A)4.

The M3 White Scout car.

And the mass produced M3 half track.

While not US produced they have a running version of the Canadian Ram Kangaroo APC.

They have several armoured cars and other light vehicles, including a M8 Greyhound in running condition.

For the British they have a Dingo.

And the Canadian manufactured version, the Lynx.

A working Humber.

And a Staghound.

Two countries are under represented in the collection. One is Italy and the other is Japan. There are no Italian vehicles but there is one solitary Japanese tank a Type 95 Ha Go, which was recovered from Rabaul after the Japanese surrender. Unlike many of the other vehicles it has not undergone any restoration work but I rather liked seeing it in this original condition.

So far I haven't touched on the artillery in the museum's collection and there is quite a lot of that, so perhaps I'll save that for a future post.