A tale from my Grandfather's photo album.
It was I think early May just before the surrender, but in our region of Germany all the soldiers had either surrendered already or disappeared back to their homes because we didn't see a single one with a gun, just drove endless patrols around the countryside checking on the delivery convoys.
One day we passed some railroad tracks and Private Willis who was with us got very excited as he worked for the Santa Fe before getting called up. When we spied this giant hulk of a locomotive he insisted that we stop to have a look.
Our Sergeant was too busy draining a cellar's worth of brandy he had found to care, so we poked around this thing for a while and borrowed the Sarg's camera to get a photo in front of it for the boys back home.
I didn't remember it until a few months after I got back home, a copy of the picture showed up from Willis for me to keep.
Model railways were my route into the hobby and I've always fancied making some cross-over vignettes. I stumbled upon an eBay seller offloading several of these old Dragon armoured train kits.
After picking one up I discovered, on researching the subject, that the format presented on the box is entirely spurious. The Armoured locos and those lovely Panzer-trains never played together, instead the locos worked with the giant BP42 armoured trains.
So I picked up several more boxes to make an authentic train of the Panzers (stay tuned) and as a result ended up with several armoured locos, so had the idea to make one into a simple solo scene.
The model builds up without any problems, the plastic is slightly soft but glues fine with Tamiya ET.
There is not a huge amount of info on these model 57 armoured locos even in dedicated books - even the paint schemes seem uncertain - most sources seem to be based on tank schemes, which makes sense.
The particular loco modelled here is recorded as having been used on training units in East Europe but not in combat, so I've taken the assumption that it would have had a yellow base coat but not had the field camo applied.
The weathering effect was somewhat accidental - after applying an enamel wash, the thinners took a lot of paint with it, exposing the red oxide style primer I had used, giving a nice rusted or paintworn look which seemed apt for a loco at this stage in the war which had possibly been used in an effort to break away from Soviet advances in the East. As a result I didn't add any further weathering aside from a little soot around the funnel.
The base was one of my new favourite wooden canvas designs. I have been using these painted white on my airfield scenes, but decided to try something different and stain the wood instead.
A coat of gloss and a rather nice looking effect.
Adding some heights to the scene.
The kit comes with several lengths of track, including moulded ballast. I stuck this in place, then filled the gaps between the tracks and padded out the ballast areas by using a mix of concrete texture paste and model railway ballast.
Painting the track and ballast was probably the most long winded part of the build. I kept rusty tones on the track to suit a line not used for a little while.
The figures are from Modelu 3d and the jeep a whitemetal kit by Arrowhead Minatures. The nameplate from Name It Plates.
