This is another example of a scratch built model of one of the less-glamorous, workaday FR wagons, but one which is essential to the running of the railway.
These wagons carry fuel for the shrinking fleet of oil fired locomotives on the FR as the line moves increasing back towards coal firing.
Today wagon 66 is generally filled with much lighter and more refined products than the waste motor engine oil which was being used in the early 1970s when it was built.
The basis of the real wagon is a 2000 gallon oval tank recycled from a road vehicle so I adopted a similar solution for my model.
I spliced together two tanks from Cooper Craft plastic kits for a 4mm scale lorry tanker.
This was fixed to a scratch built chassis fabricated from 'I' section styrene strip and mounted on bogies knocked up in styrene to represent the ex-Polish State Railways plate frame bogies.
I used fine etched brass mesh from Scalelink for the walkways on top of the tanks.
The red stripes were done using thick lining from Fox Transfers and the word OiL made up using pieces of big white letters such as L's and T's.
If you look carefully at that word OiL you'll see how it's designed to look like a steam engine. The O is the cab, the i the boiler with the dot representing a dome and the L the smokebox and chimney which is emitting some spherical puffs of steam. It always makes me smile.
The actual wagons are mostly seen parked at the fueling point beneath the water tower at Harbour Station or at Boston Lodge Works. If you're around at the right time you might see the empty ones being taken away or full ones brought down from Minffordd Yard.
How then do we justify running this model of Wagon 66 on Dduallt?
Our excuse is a special trip-working to Glan-y-Pwll to service a steam loco which has been based there for a short season of workings, for which there is a precedent.
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