3d printed GWR wagons

My perverse liking for modelling Edwardian-era GWR in 2mm Fine Scale is shared by Ian Smith, who designed a few wagons for 3d printing a while ago. These were made available on Shapeways, and I bought a couple (W2 medium-size cattle wagons, which filled a hole in my existing range/plans). They are designed to work with separate etched W-iron units (2-312) which I hadn't used previously, so I tried to modify them to fit onto a conventional chassis by narrowing the solebars slightly. This was not a success - I made no progress in filing away the surplus material, but it was too fragile in the area where I was holding the body and various pieces splintered and fell off....

I put this project on one side (along with many others), and moved onto other things.

Recently a change of policy at Shapeways has removed these items from sale to third parties - purportedly they can't be guaranteed to print properly. So Ian has now put on a shopkeeper's hat, and is accepting orders for wagons which he then gets printed for himself and distributes to would-be purchasers.

The main demand has been for cattle wagons - as well as the W2 medium Ian provides models for the W3 small and W1/W5 large varieties. In addition, an outside-framed goods van and outside-framed brake van are available. There are also some experimental springs and axleboxes, but they can't yet be reliably printed.

I decided to have another try at these, and negotiated delivery (via St Ruth at Epsom and Ewell Exhibition) of 6 large cattle wagons, 2 vans and a brake van (the latter being received by Ian from Shapeways the day before he set off for the show). I already have a scratchbuilt W3, and they were relatively rare so I don't think I need another (specially one which would show up the inadequacies of my own).

The 3d printing process appears to suit these models fairly well - large flat surfaces tend to suffer from "banding", depending on the alignment of the model in the printer, and these have no such surfaces, so the problem doesn't occur. On the other hand, it would be much easier to clean and sand such surfaces ...

There are various suggestions for cleaning the surplus wax from the models - what worked for me was repeated runs through an ultrasonic cleaner, followed by brisk brushing with a toothbrush.

I patched up the broken sides of the cattle wagon, with the fallback plan of hiding it under a tarpaulin (probably as carrying fruit) and started with it and a van for my first two. The main challenge with these models is constructing suitable underframe details. As I had made up a lot of 2-330 underframes for 4-plank opens and iron minks, all with single-sided brakes, I had plenty of spares to provide brake shoes, levers, v-hangers etc. The other two models, large cattle wagon and brake van, have a longer wheelbase, so will probably need brake gear from an 11 foot wheelbase chassis.

There have been reports of painting difficulties for this material ("Frosted Ultra Detail", or "FUD"), indicating that the paint "never dries". There may be some justification for these reports, as I found the paint did seem very slow to dry, but it did dry eventually.

My interpretation of the GWR livery timescale is that freight wagons switched from red to grey about 1904, and my layout is set around 1905, so nearly all my freight stock will be in the red livery. I am currently using Precision Paints buffer beam red to represent it, over a Halfords red primer, but will probably experiment with a few variations to represent older/faded wagons. Prior to 1904 (and the switch to grey livery?) when 25 inch "G" and "W" appeared, the lettering was 5 inch "G.W.R", which could be either painted on the side or on a cast plate. I prefer the cast plate approach, as it's fairly easy to represent with computer printing onto ordinary paper, but I am unclear on the background colour for it - my assumption was black, with white lettering, but the current edition of Great Western Way suggests that it was probably the same colour as the wagon side. A good reason to procrastinate a bit longer before finishing the wagons.

Interior of the cattle wagons would be liberally lime-washed, the practice lasting until about Grouping, and some of this would have probably dribbled down the outside of the wagon.

There will be a few challenges with the brake van - extra footboards for the underframe, handrails to add to the sides, and decision whether to use the existing body material (unpainted) as rather dirty windows or to cut out and glaze some proper windows.