This week I finished a lovely kit (7/273 from Skytrex Models) for a GWR 5-ton yard crane, to add some visual interest to the goods yard at Bydemill – my 7mm scale Great Western Railway layout. I’m very pleased.
The kit consists mostly of white metal castings, plus wire and chain. My kit’s castings are crisp and required minimal cleanup. The instructions include an image to help identify and differentiate the many similar parts, plus a few photos of the finished model to help with construction. Thick CA and CA accelerator made assembly easy and quick.
I painted the finished crane with Tamiya XF-84 Dark Iron. (I don’t advocate drinking paint as a rule, but I’d make an exception for this colour. It’s positively delicious.) I also ordered a stone plinth for the crane (Skytrex 7/295A), which I painted with a variety of Vallejo colours. I then weathered both crane and base, applied a flat finish coat to both, and secured them together with CA.
The completed crane is tippy: The metal boom makes it front-heavy. The simple answer would’ve been to glue it to the layout, but I have a lot of scenery work to do and wanted to have the option to remove the crane from the scene to keep it safe while slinging ground cover. I was also curious about whether I could make the crane positionable for photographs.
My solution was to drill the base of the stone plinth (before attaching it to the crane) for a pair of small magnets. I put these in line with the boom, so they’d counteract the tendency for tipping.
I glued the magnets in place with CA, flush with the bottom face of the plinth. I then attached a large steel fender washer to the layout with Gorilla Glue. This worked very well.
When it’s time to do scenery, I’ll build a ring around the washer, with a diameter just larger than the plinth, then build up the ground contours to bury it. The plinth will also rotate with the crane, but I’m fine with that.
I recognize a 5-ton crane is pretty big for the branch line terminal I’m modelling. I think a 2-ton crane would’ve been more plausible – and Skytrex offers one. But I preferred the look of the 5-ton crane – particularly the frames that support the various gears and spindles.
I’ll have to paint some figures to go with this beautiful model – and start the scenery in the goods yard!
The Model Railway Show 