Small Scale Military Headquarters

First off, this will be a looong thread and it will take some time to really get a start (due to our wedding coming up next month), but I think that this is a good project to bring my military modeling hobby together with my G scale train hobby. So where do you start when modeling an Armoured train ??? Well why not start at the front and work backwards So I have offically started with the lead car that is in front of the locomotive. Typically, an armoured consist could vary, but I will start off with a AA /AT front end car, the armour plated loco, armour plated tender, a armour plated command car and the end car which would be another armoured plated AA/AT car.

So I've started on the lead car. An AA / AT type car would usually have a cannon in the front and a AA type gun such as a flak gun of some type in the back of the car with a control housing in the middle. The entire car should be armour plated for crew safety. The car I am patterning my car after will be like the one on the movie "The Train". I have done or am still working on the cannon housing on the cannon using a Pk40 75mm unit with a shortened barrel. I believe the, or most of the prototypes used a 50mm cannon. But due to the lack of cannons in 1/18th, I stuck with the Pk40. For the other half(back side) of the turret, I will be using a modified rear section of a Pz IV turret. Now the pictures I have are the "In progress" pictures. I don't get much time to work on it for now until the end of April, then work should accelerate. The most unique thing I found is that the front end of the armour looks like the hood area of the SDkfz 251 of which I cut one up just for that reason Don't worry, the rest will be rebuilt into a Maurader III tank Ok here the few pictures I have for tonight after playin' with the idea I had.







Now earlier I had played with the idea of using PH's quad gun, but it will be quite a challange to make it work due to the differences in scales wit hthe 1/18th and the trains 1/22nd. Yet I WILL make it work.



Now I'm just trying to figure out what will work where, but I think the ideas are off to a good start Stay tuned for more updates !!!

Da General

Great start.

Man that is a lot of stuff.

That flak gun looks right at home on that train.

That is a monster train collection. It is totally cool.

Thanks PH
The only problem is I keep running out of room I think my walkway is down to under 17". A tight squeeze I am trying right now to tack on another 1x6 to gain a bit of room by my chair to put my 88 and a searchlight. The power screwdriver ran out of juice, so I can't drill holes to wire up the signals and lights, but there's always something to do Perhaps I need to use the step stool and lean over the table to get to the back so I can pour in the brown scale gravel for the road behind tyhe rail yard. Yep, so much to do Or I can put troops in the passenger cars. Oh well.

Da General