TAKE A RIDE IN A GONDOLA

In order to give our trains something to pull, you need rolling stock. As part of our long-term plan, we bought Dragon's German Railway Gondola Typ Ommr w/AA Gun Crew (Ref: 6086).

Well you can hardly blame us, modellers & manufacturers alike got a bit carried away with the trend for railway subjects in 1:35th scale & that whole train thing.

It all started when we bought Trumpeter’s 1:35th Scale Kriegslok, then we found any form of wagon or flatcar hard to resist.

We’ve calmed down a bit now (thankfully) but we still plan to build a mega diorama one day. In preparation for that day, the Gondola made its way into the stash when it was offered at half the usual asking price - a bargain.

The appeal of these kits is the possibility of doing some serious weathering at the painting stage. As soon as you open the box you realize that it’s full of potential.

The parts – in typical medium grey resin of the early Dragon era – boast plenty of detail. The wooden sides in particular exhibit some wood texture that should weather nicely.

There are a whopping 245 parts, which for such a simple piece of rolling stock seems excessive. But the detail’s all there. The vast majority of parts go underneath the kit to build up the chassis, brakes & wheels – all of which is hidden. By the way, that’s no bad thing as hydraulics, cabling or tubing are not supplied – if you want to depict that you’ve got your work cut out!

The other sprues (10 in all) make up the carriage sides, floor, doors & so on.

It’s all pretty well done, there’s some injection pin marks here & there but crucially none on the wooden engraving. There are also some redundant bits & pieces from other Dragon railway releases (like the armoured flatcar). The other parts for buffers wheels etc. appear to come from the default Dragon railway sprues seen in other kits.

Of note is the inclusion of the gun crew manning an AA tripod mount. It’s a nice idea & the crew are depicted bare-chested manning the MG34 (archive films show a lot of soldiers were not the hunks model manufacturers seem to think they were – but anyway). It’s all pretty respectably-moulded & the crew could be used anywhere.

So stand by for an outing in our gondola the day we eventually get around to making our World War Two German marshalling yard. The idea we’ve got may include an attacking “Jabo” so that gun crew could be kept busy!