How to Make a Styrene Roof for Carriages

One of the best ways to put a roof on any model carriage is to make a styrene roof curved to shape, to suit the carriage being built. This ensures that there is very little or no stresses from the roof material to “spring” the Urethane cast sides.

This is easily done by taking a sheet of .20”/ .5mm styrene sheet and cut to length and width to suit the carriage being roofed. It is good practice to add/allow an extra 5mm of material all round to ensure coverage is achieved – the excess material can be trimmed off in the final fitting.

Find a suitable length of steel tubing – if possible to the correct diameter required to suit the carriage kit end walls. I use a piece of steel tube I saved from a piece of exercise equipment (foot section), which had been discarded by a neighbor during a local shire, kerbside rubbish collection, but any metal tube can be used including vacuum cleaner pipe, pedestal fan etc.

Take the cut section of styrene sheet and tape the ends to the steel pipe using electrical tape ensuring that the styrene is square along the pipe. Then simply wind the tape tightly along the length of the pipe ensuring the styrene sheet is pulled tight onto the pipe

Take the pipe section and stand it in the kitchen sink ( I usually have the plastic side down) and prepare 2 full kettles of boiling water - I keep an old kettle spare for this purpose so that you have the water ready to go. With the water at boiling, carefully pour the boiled water down the inside of the tube – slowly I find is best, allowing more time for good heat transfer to the steel pipe.

 

 

Allow the pipe to cool and then remove the electrical tape to reveal a nicely shaped section of curved roof material.

Take the roof section and test fit it to carriage – carefully trim the long edge to achieve a neat fit to the carriage body – this might mean making several small cuts/trims till correct size is achieved - allow excess overhang on the ends to enable addition of bargeboards and carriage end trimmings.

Glue roof into place by firstly gluing (squarely) on the end walls then using a scalpel blade laden with glue on its top surface, gently lift the sides with the pointy end and push a little glue onto roof underside and then allow the roof to return to its position – hold in place until set and then tack a few more places. Once the roof is tacked into place, run a bead of glue down the inside of the body to seal along the length. Fit end detail and trim to length.

AZ 435 – A Variation

The choice to produce a model of AZ 435 was brought about by a desire to make a variation on my original AZ model described in a previous article on this blog.

 The requirements of the variation were that the coach needed to have survived in original car body form retaining all of its crown light windows and matchboard sides to enable use of the existing AZ kit without having to make too many changes. The next requirement was that it should have survived to the end of the steam era and be in the Green and Cream livery with Flettner Vents on the roof. The last criteria was that hopefully I would find a picture of such an AZ with a later version “Half Stable Type” centre door that would make it different to my previous model. That picture was found in the WAGR Carriage Bible in the form of AZ 435 as seen here in this picture from the Murray Rowe/Geoff Blee Collection.

And so armed with evidence and keen to add another carriage to my fleet, I set about building the WestOzModels AZ body kit, achieving body completion in a relatively short time.

During construction there would be a need to "kit bash" the centre door to achieve the Half Stable type door variant from the original door as seen in picture A below. This was achieved by carefully cutting away the centre panel and the frame at the top of the panelling between the frames of the door as can be seen in picture B. The next job was to gently file away the remainder of the beading to achieve a smooth door frame. Next a new middle frame section for the doors was cut to size from 20 thou styrene sheet and inserted in the correct position between the frames and then a section of strip styrene was added to show the separation of the two door sections as can be seen in picture C. A section of styrene was then cut to size to fill the gap in the lower door as seen in picture D. Picture E shows the finished result.

A “first” for me on construction of this carriage, was use of a styrene roof which I am pleased to say worked really well. This involved cutting a section of 20 Thou styrene, slightly larger than the size required for the roof, and then I grabbed my metal vacuum cleaner pipe and tightly bound the styrene sheet to the outside of the pipe with black electrical tape as seen in the picture below (left top). I then stood the pipe in the kitchen sink and carefully poured 2-3 full kettles of boiling water through the pipe. This action heats the metal pipe and the heat is transferred to the styrene plastic causing it to take the shape of the pipe. After removal from the pipe the styrene has held its curved shape. After matching the styrene to the coach and trimming to size, the roof material was held in place on the carriage simply using some masking tape and glued in place. The ends then had strip bargeboard added under the roof material and then the excess roof length was filed back to match the bargeboard.

With these jobs done it was onto the detail work under the floor which has some battery boxes, water tanks, a transformer box and of course the required brake equipment of Vacuum cylinders and V hangers, and the supporting taution bars as can be seen in this picture. Other detail including Concertinas, Flettner vents on the roof and end detail was also applied.

With all the major work done its onto the paint to really bring the model to life . The carriage is sprayed using a Holts auto spray grey primer and Humbrol paints (sprayed). Decals were then applied and the body finished with a Wattyl Estapol Matt spray. Windows were then applied using Micromark MicroGlaze.

And so here is the finished product built from a WestOzModels AZ bodykit using detailing parts fromWestOzModels and Railwest

The real AZ 435 (pictured near top of page) entered service on the WAGR on 29/9/1928 working as a first class sleeping car on the long distance expresses. After cessation of the overnight express services in the early 70’s, the car saw use on tour trains before being written off in March 1984 and was sold to a private owner for use with Hotham Valley Tourist Railway where it remains today.