I was recently rather worried by the fact that Parkside Dundas were listing their 5.1mm narrow gauge wheels as both out of stock and out of production. This was seriously worrying as I use these wheels in most of the 3D printed narrow gauge wagons I've designed and without the wheels the wagons wouldn't be much good. I sent a rather panicked e-mail asking if they were ever intending to have more stock and received a prompt answer saying that more stock was on order. The site hasn't been updated yet but hopefully I'll be able to order some more soon.
A few days later I saw a posting over on NGRM by Jam describing his new layout, which you can also read about on his blog. He'd been asked about the rolling stock he intended to use on his layout which is going to be based on the narrow gauge railway that used to serve the A.G.W.I Oil Refinery at Fawley in Hampshire. He mentioned that he'd seen some flat wagons he wanted to use but that the Parkside Dundas wheels were currently unavailable. I replied to let him know that they should be available again soon only to discover that the wagons he'd been looking at where the freelance wagons I designed back when I started modelling narrow gauge railways! A quick look at a the few available photographs of the wagons used on the line and I could see why my flat wagons had appealed but I decided that it would be fairly easy to update the 3D model to more accurately represent the wagons from the refinery.
Unfortunately neither Jam or I have been able to find any scale drawings of the wagons, so I've had to work from just four photographs which appear in the book "The Calshot and Fawley Narroe Gauge Railways" by Frederick W. Cooper. Fortunately one of the photos includes the end of a wagon end on to the camera so given that we know the line was 2' gauge I could easily determine the total width of the wagon as well as some of the details. Jam had already decided to use the PECO model scene oil drums to represent the asphalt barrels and amazingly the width I came up with was an almost perfect match for three barrels as shown in the photos.
With the width worked out and knowing that the wagons were long enough to hold four barrels (photos show them holding 15 barrels, three across and five along the length of the wagon, but the fifth one is always about to fall off the end) I could then work out the length of the wagon and the remaining details. With the rough model posed to match the photos it looks like I've got the basic geometry correct at least.
This render shows that I still needed to add final details (bolts etc.) but most of that will have to be from guesswork as I can see almost no bolts on any of the photos (the quality is just too low), but there are some places where bolts would be needed to hold everything together so I'll at least add those before I order a set of prototype prints.
You're never short of projects: that's for sure.
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