MOTW - The Iron Bogie

Interactivity is all the rage in the media these days. It's no longer any good for professional journalists - like me - who've spent their whole careers researching a subject to tell you what to think about it, now every ignoramus has to have their say. (*Irony alert for those with no sense of humour!*)

So in this spirit I'm delighted to be able to respond to a reader's request for the subject of this Model Of The Week feature, the 6 wheel coal wagon or 'Iron Bogie'

Or, as my correspondent referred to it, the 'I can't believe it's not a Cleminson' wagon.



It was built at Boston Lodge Works in 1880 and mounted on flexible two-wheel trucks, but later investigations revealed its underframe arrangement does not conform precisely to Cleminson's patent. Although the outer axles can turn and the middle one can swing there is an extra link between them missing.

Some have suggested this may have been an error born out of ignorance or a cunning wheeze to avoid paying for the use of the patent, but either way they probably need not have bothered because experiments running the chassis around sharp curves during restoration in the 1990's showed the centre axle hardly moved anyway.

Which is all the justification I needed for not bothering to articulate this model at all! The one concession on an otherside solid chassis is the some side play on the centre wheelset. Instead of a pin point axle it has a longer axle and the centre axle boxes are drill through allowing it to move about 2-3 mm either way.

I confess I can't remember a great deal about how I built it (it was probably more than 15 years ago now) but I seem to recall I chopped up some old Egger wagon frames to make a 3-axle chassis and the body was built from styrene.

What I do remember very clearly is attempting to slice the thinnest possible slivers of styrene rod to represent rivets on the strapping on the iron body and gluing each one of them on by hand.



In these days of waterslide resin transfer rivets these now look horribly crude and make me wonder whether I should build a replacement with more subtle detailing?

So, to bring us back to the theme of interactivity with which I began this post, I'll throw the question out to you all.

If this was your model what would you do?