Milking it: the Hoki Train

DB says: Making a UK mold was the best thing I've ever done in NZ120 - I must have run off about 20 of the little buggers by now.

The Midland line isn't all coal trains and skittles, you know. For the past few years, trains 827 and 828 have run back and forth across the Alps moving dairy traffic from the plant at Hokitika on weekdays during the season. Now that DBR 1213 has migrated its old bones north, it's usually powered by two DCs, with one of them taking the train down from Greymouth in the afternoon as X6 shunt. It then gets loaded with milk powder, butter and other dairy products and comes gingerly back into Greymouth across some beaut old bridges in the early-evening to depart for Christchurch after dark.

The train is quite sizable and usually fully loaded up with Hoki traffic, with general goods for Greymouth usually coming over on the Reefton train. I figure 6 forty footers and 4 UKs worth of whatever the twenty foot TBCs are called these days will do nicely to represent 827/828.

The 40 foot lo-cubes were covered in this blog a few weeks ago, and the 20s are fresh pours of those covered last year. These ones are plain white resin with some leftover transfers and the blue line was drawn in using a blue permanent marker. They'll be weathered a little later on and the UKs painted up with the details visible on the rightmost 40.

I'm up to four completed UKs with 40s and two with 20s as I type this and intend to resume production this weekend after running out of MT bogies a week or so ago, with my dealer of such substances being (oddly) out of them. Must be global warming or those theivin' zombie goblins or something. I received some last night from a competitor (whatever did we do before the internet).

As the UK (and other modern container wagon) bogies are a fair way inboard, I had been cutting off the couplers, saving them for other uses (locos, 4 wheelers etc) and gluing the revolutionary 'underslung' couplers straight to the wagon underside to get me a nice low wagon with correct coupler height (as discussed in the 40 footer post), and this has been working well. This time, I cleverly ordered a bulk pack (10 sets) of bogies without couplers (as used on articulated US stack cars) to save me the chopping hassle, and 10 sets with couplers for other wagons. Noice.