Tricking Out An Armoured Train Car

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This past week was spent working on terrain bits and pieces. This includes experimenting with the making of a railroad road bed (without success), an oasis, Acacia trees, a base for a house and some leader stands for the Dervish.

My favorite piece though, was taking an LGB flat car and modifying it as a flat car with steel plates to protect the troops. The car will have either a Gatling Gun or a Krupp cannon on the front end (see picture below).

Flatcar with steel plates on the sides to protect the men.

Britain's Egyptian artillery crew with Krupp gun, supported by some Egyptian infantry.

The inspiration for my conversion work comes from an illustration in The Illustrated London Times. 

A picture of the flatcar prior to the conversion work.

The last picture in the group above depicts what the flatcar looked like prior to my conversion work. The first thing was to remove the brakeman's house from the car, which was accomplished with the removal of several Phillips Head screws. I then removed the bed of the car so that I could prime it and repaint it in dark grey and highlighted by a lighter shade of grey. This removed the shiny look from the car and gave it a weathered look.

The next step was to make the steel side panels for the flat car. The British military added these side plates in order to protect the men from bullets. I used .03mm wood figure bases (1" by 2") that I bought from Litko. I gave them an undercoat of black paint, then worked up to brown umber, then red-brown, and finally highlighted with Reaper "Rust" paint. The panels were attached to the car using a hot glue gun.

I am happy with how this conversion worked out and now I am keen to do some conversion work on the coal tender and locomotive sometime in the future.

My next post will feature some of the terrain projects that I worked on this past week. If you fancy a sneak peak at the terrain, then click on the page "52 Weeks to Historicon" and scroll down to the end of the post.

I set up my troops to fight the Battle of Abu Klea, featuring the British Camel Corps and the Dervish. I plan on fighting this as a solo game so that I can generate lots of pictures for some other publications as well as for my blog. I will report on the action by the end of next week.

The Road to "Khartoum!" at Historicon 2023 continues.