Wednesday 20 November 2013

Tank-car loading platforms - one down, two to go...

Back in this post I mentioned that I had some TrainCat tank-car loading platforms on order for the Kerr McGee Refinery at Wynnewood.  The kits arrived a few weeks back, but today was my first chance to tackle building them.

TrainCat describes these kits as being "a quick one evening kit", and that is probably true if you've had experience with similar kits before.  But this was the first brass kit of any sort that I've assembled, and I found the job to be a lot more fiddly than I had expected.  All up, it took me about 4 hours from Go to Whoa which I guess does meet the "one evening" description, and I'm sure that I will reduce that substantially when I do the next two kits.

The quality of the kits and instructions is very good, although I did have one piece break when I folded it over.  I glued the parts together and they seemed fine, until the glue joint failed when I accidentally put too much pressure on it during final assembly.

Here's the assembled kit sitting on my work map.  You can see that the access platform on the far side is missing one of the handrails.





















I'll repair the damaged platform in a day or two, after the rest of the glue has set properly.

Time to get back to work. Thanks for looking.

Regards,
Ron