I've always loved the military train sets from the world of tinplate and Lionel, so this was definitely an item on my list of "druthers" for the railroad.
While I knew there were no full-fledged military bases along the line of the TFRR, from an operations standpoint I planned to justify this traffic by having this train serve a reserve unit in one of the towns. I was surprised to discover that not one of the towns had so much as as a National Guard armory! In the course of my research I DID discover that quite a few men from Macon County, North Carolina, were organized into units and sent off to fight Civil War. One of these, the 7th Calvary Battalion, seemed like a nice fit for the classic WWII-era M3 Lee and M4 Sherman tanks that I knew I wanted to model on flat cars.
As for the actual train, USA Trains offers a nice collection of military cars sized for garden railroading, however the modern tanks and humvees did not mesh with the mid-1950's era setting of our TFRR and the prices were quite a bit more than I wanted to pay.
Instead I decided to see if I could find some inexpensive cars on ebay that could be adapted to the purpose. Here is the first of these, an old Kalamazoo-brand passenger/baggage "combine" in 1:24 scale that I won for $24.45, shown here with the trucks and roof already removed.
The first thing I had to do was cut off the bottom step on each corner, as these had already demonstrated themselves to consistently hang on the housing for the throw mechanism that switches the track on the Aristocraft turnouts/switches. In this photo, the steps on the yellow Kalamazoo caboose on the adjoining track have the same problem, so the two cars give a nice "before and after" perspective.
After this came a couple of coats of brushed-on green house paint left over from painting the door to the back porch, thinned with water and mixed with a little black paint to get closer to military olive drab. The house paint immediately eliminates the shiny/slick look of unpainted plastic, so its impossible to do wrong. I intentionally kept the coats kind of light to allow the original plastic red/maroon color to bleed through a little - give it the uneven texture of paint that has been out in the sun and rain for awhile.
I also gave a quick coat to the inside of the car, as well as wash of dilute black paint on the floor to bring out the texture in the molded wood pattern.
There was some discussion about how to utilize the baggage end of the car, including possible designation as a mobile ammo locker, an HQ area and the idea we finally selected - the mobile hospital. This was chosen because the classic red cross on the white field would look so distinctive, while also serving as a reminder of the cost associated with the machines of war.
The circle was traced with a pencil around the cap from a bottle, then painted in free-hand with white paint.
I carefully laid out the red crosses in pencil, but the effort to free-hand the red infill was a disaster, leading to awful, wobbly looking crosses. Like a new barber trying to "fix" a haircut, the crosses got fatter with each attempt to square up the corners. Finally I used a fine tip red Sharpie permanent marker and a ruler to dress the edges, which worked a miracle and cleaned the crosses up quite nicely. Next I used a slightly larger bottle cap and a black Sharpie to fix up the equally unpleasant outer circle you see here.
The end result is that the crosses are still a lot fatter than I would have preferred, but - as usual - from 10 feet away it all looks pretty decent.
Next to be completed on this car will be:
- Lettering the car with rail reporting marks and "NCNG 7th Calvary Battalion".
- Installation of a Kadee coupler (the TFRR-standard) on the troop end of the car. By some fluke I found myself with an odd number of Kadee #830's, which I discovered after installing the one remaining coupler I had on hand on the hospital end of the car.
- Some basic interior detailing, including some benches in the troop end and some bunk beds in the other.
- Addition of some soldiers! I'm hoping to find some cheap green army men that can be improved with a little detail painting and placed to be visible through the windows of the car.
Here's a look at the new car with the rest of our short military train, which is basically complete except for lettering and detailing.
Valerie, for scale!
