Bullion Carriers: Body and Underframe Complete

The major push this week has seen the last of the rebuilding of elements and adding of detail to both the underframe area and body of the bullion van for Train Simulator 2013.

All that's left now is to construct the friction damped B5 bogies that will go under these vehicles. The bogies have been mocked up and the frames are in the process of being fabricated.

The Night Capitals: Final Master GUV shape.

After much looking at pictures, continual adding of bits and a pretty manic time in non modelling life it's great to have a couple of final shape renders of the GUV for our Night Capitals stock addon for RailWorks 3 Train Simulator 2012 to show off.

The plan has always been to create a generic shape that can be exported to create most variations that the GUV has gone through in its life time. The top picture shows a shape in as delivered condition with step boards, vacuum brakes and through steam pipe. The step boards found themselves removed fairly early on as they were frequently damaged during the transhipment of BRUTE trollies.

The second picture is of possibly the most complicated (and possibly not true to life) variant with dual brakes, through electric wiring and steam pipe along with a gangway buffing plate. The buffing plate was  a modification applied to Motorail vans to help stop shocks under braking between the clasp braked GUV and disc braked Mk3 sleepers. The buffing plate fitted vans were not recognised by TOPS when still in the standard number range so which vans in Motorail traffic were fitted is a matter for conjecture.

Now these are out of the way it's time to put some serious effort into the mark 1 sleepers!

Brakes and Lights GUV?

It's been a surprisingly hard slog today to get the under frame and equipment underneath the generic GUV shape.

Sometimes you can have too much information and there even came a point where Pythagoras had to be used.

The under frame itself is complete now and all the equipment bits are there with the exception of the air tank, distributor and actuators to add.

Just bogies and the buffer beam detailing to add after that.

Nice Body GUV

The last couple of days have seen some time put in on the generic GUV shape.

The body is just about complete now, some solebar area detail to add then it's under-frame and bogies time.