Casey Jones, a steamin' and a rollin'... 6mm ACW train

 Blimey, I've actually done some painting. Well I never. 

I'm sure readers of a certain vintage will recall the steam powered adventures of Casey Jones and the Cannonball Express in the Wild West. Never a week went by without some form of calamity, a dam collapsing, rampaging 'savages', and in one highly improbable episode some saboteurs putting dynamite inside the fuel logs of the train!

Anyway, I digress. Recently Nigel D noticed my renewed interest in the ACW and gifted me this magnificent 6mm 3D printed train, and immediately Casey and the Cannonball sprang to mind.

It is a single piece resin print, pre mounted on a section of railway atop a low embankment. I've no idea if it is a commercial model or just printed from an STL. Engine, tender, two passenger carriages and a caboose.

And as usual with modern 3D prints, the detail is just....stunning. A bit blurry but you can see daylight through the carriage windows as they are printed hollow.

Similarly the cab and even the spokes on the main drive wheels. Just amazing and beyond the dreams of metal manufacturers, and possibly even stretching some injection moulded plastic. Bear in mind this is a 1/300th scale model.

And much to my delight, it is actually 1/300th and not 1/240th like so much Baccus stuff. Here it is with my venerable Irregular 6mm (European) train which has attended many battles and even graces the cover of one of John Curry's republished wargaming books. You can see that they are virtually identical in dimensions, so the ideal opportunity for a bit of mix and match...

First job was to get the train off its huge plinth so it will stand at a similar height to my other rolling stock. My first attempt was to cut the train off the track, but the resin is too hard and brittle, so instead I cut, sawed and snapped the railway embankment off, which came away OK. The train is left balancing on a bit of track, but that is fine as my Irregular train and wagons are also on card bases as they fall over if put directly on the track. 

The only downside of this is that the interior of the embankment hadn't cured properly, so there is some stinky slightly sticky resin on the bottom. I'll sort that out later.

After that I chopped the train into sections. The overall model is over 5" long which is far too long for my hexon hexes. I separated the train and tender from the pair of carriages, which made two sections about 2" long, and split off the caboose which is such a distinctive bit of American kit.

I did this very carefully using a razor saw as there were very finely printed bumpers between each carriage.

My Irregular train is also based in similar groupings, engine/tender and pairs of good wagons of various types in 2" sections. So now I can use the passenger carriages with my European train and the goods wagons with my US train. Result!

OK, on to painting.

What a delightful modelling rabbit hole '1860s era American trains' was. Evidently a popular subject for colour postcards of the time, and of course well provided with actual railway models. I ended up basing my 'Cannonball Express' on a mixture of contemporary postcard images and some very neat modern model railway engines.

The engine is based on one actually used by the US Army military railroad and seems remarkably colourful with its blue boiler, red wheels, red cow catcher and white lining and polished brass. The real one had 'Clark' written in white letters between the lines on the cab, but I couldn't manage that in 6mm.

The tender is based on a commercial railroad, I cant recall which one. Red with a yellow rectangle, and obviously a big pile of logs in the middle.

Carriages seemed to come in a range of colours but I went with this yellowish tone which featured on a few of the postcards. I gather the caboose was always painted red (presumably as a marker of sorts) and I did all the roofs in a mid grey to blend them in together.

The red was a pig to get to cover the undercoat, as usual, three coats minimum. I should have undercoated the red bits brown first. The yellow is actually a GW ochre shade which covers well, unusually for a yellow.

The black parts on the engine and running gear got a wash of Nuln Oil and everything else got a wash of Agrax Earthshade (still experimenting with those). There was a  bit of staining, particularly on the caboose, the roofs and the lower sides of the carriages so I went over those again when the shade had dried. Finally I just did some gunmetal highlights on some of the metal bits, although in reality they would probably all have been painted black. I also drybrushed some dark earth on the remaining bits of track under the wheels so they will look the same as my existing 6mm train.

The Irregular flat car and goods wagon fits in nicely.

Equally my Irregular engine and tender can pull the carriages in Europe.

I'm very pleased with that, many thanks Nigel. I just need to run some more ACW games with railway lines in them! Naturally my thoughts are now turning to armoured trains....