Fancy a dirty weekend?

To finish off the HBA/HEA hopper production line there needed to be some dirty versions and they have now been created.

Mirroring all of the other versions you have seen already you'll be able to form dirty trains with an odd clean wagon or go for any mixture that you want.

Clean HEA Hoppers

These have been sitting quietly for a couple of days so it seemed a good idea to finally share them.

In a bid to increase the maximum speed of the HBA hoppers and following a number of trials the last 200 were built with Bruninghaus springs rather than the 13 leaf friction link suspension originally fitted which allowed the maximum speed to be raised to 75mph so the hoppers could work in the fastest Speedlink trains. The modification was successful and the majority of the friction link fitted HBAs were subsequently rebuilt in line with the last 200 hoppers.

The decision to recode the modified wagons with the HEA TOPS code was made in late 1981 which means that from 1979 - 1981 the last 200 hoppers and any of the early conversions ran with Bruninghaus springs and the TOPS code HBA.

The HBA set

The main models in 'clean' textures for the HBA hoppers are now finished. There are two different shapes, each in two contrasting liveries.

First HBA Hopper

After a good while spent dealing with a hectic life that has all but precluded any development time it's great to have found chance to make a bit of progress with the air braked hoppers this week.

The very earliest version of an HBA hopper, with long link suspension and a central ladder (a feature of about the first 230 wagons) is now basically complete with the exception of LODs and carries a slightly weary all over maroon livery without any Railfreight logos as these were the exception with the maroon liveried wagons.

A while ago one of the testers commented about the lack of a label clip on the underframe of the wagons and these were duly added! While working on the models this week it struck me that an empty label clip is pretty pointless on a wagon in traffic so there are now different labels for empty and loaded version. The detail picture below shows this to effect along with some of the other detail carried by the hoppers.