Railcar body

A couple of hours work with the soldering iron and here we go. Not a bad looking railcar body, but a pretty heavy one!

First, the sides and floor were made up using a ruler to ensure everything is in a straight line. This left tiny gaps around the centre doors. I'll live with these as a humped body is more of a problem. Running low-melt in from the back pretty much eradicates them anyway.

The floor slots in place and with a couple of partitions in place, all seemed to be going well so I added the second side followed by the rest of the partitions. The great thing about low-melt soldering is that you can tack bits together very quickly and undo the join if it need adjustment.

The ends take a little care as they aren't identical. The panelling under the windows is deeper at one end than the other. These castings took a little massaging with fingers to straighten them up but after this, the champhered corners fitted pretty well although I did need to cut away a little bit of casting below the floor.

Once happy, all the joins were seam soldered. It's still very flexible at this point, etched sides would be better in this respect, but I can certainly see how the model is going to come together.