Building a new flat wagon for tree trunks

Drawing and design

The NMBS fiche with dimensions.

These wagons were redesigned in 1979 with new much larger rungs specifically for the transport of tree trunks in the Ardennes. The original wagons date from 1968 and had the UIC type rungs. These rungs are much lower and less suited for high and relative light loads such as tree trunks.
For Fremo use wagons with rungs are of special interest because these allow transport of all sorts of visible loads and as most stations are agricultural oriented, transport of loads of wood is common. One disadvantage of wagons with rungs is that they are prone to damage with the plastic rungs broken off in incidents during (un)loading. The rungs of this wagon can be represented with 1 mm square H profile which allows to produce a soldered construction with metal rungs soldered to metal solebars such that a more robust construction can be made that hopefully will survive Fremo use.

To get enough weight in the wagon the solebars are made of 1.5 x 1 mm brass profile soldered to a metal floor. In order to get the rungs in correct position and square to the solebar a soldering jig was produced by milling grooves in the right places in a piece of 6 mm Trespa. This is an excellent material for jigs, easy to mill and can withstand soldering temperatures with ease. The base of the wagon is thin sheet metal, I choose 0.4 mm NS, because its lower heat conductance allows easier soldering of the completed solebars to the edge of the sheet than brass. Also a thin floor doesn't need cut-outs for the wheel flanges. The floor carries a reinforcement of 2 parallel beams with cross members, these are realised with strips of 1.5 and 1.0 mm brass to add some weight and cladded with polystyrene details. The planked deck and headboards and various details are realised in engraved polystyrene. Between the rungs sit horizontal beams that produce space for unloading the load with forklift trucks or to slip in strands for lifting with hoists or cranes. The buffer beams are made from 1.5 x 4 x 0.5 mm brass L-profile, cut, filed and pre-drilled to dimension.

The jig used for soldering the rungs to the solebar.

Image of the basic floor arrangement from NS sheet with reinforcement from brass strips, pivot for the bogie and buffer beam from brass L profile. Also shown are the milled claddings from 0.8 mm polystyrene sheet simulating the structural built-up.

The basic construction of the wagon, a flat sheet with pivots and reinforcement, solebars with rungs and buffer beams. The soldering of the solebars to the floor sheet was done with the resistance soldering unit allowing to induce quick heat pulses without de-soldering any of the rungs.

Here the engraved floor milled from black polystyrene is added with its beams between rungs, this is glued with 2 component epoxy, both sides roughened of course.

The above image was Photoshop generated, stacked from 5 photos taken with an iPhone and has an AI generated background, on large its quite OK, but it favours lots of standing posts. Those nearby on the concrete wall were edited out here using the clone stamp tool, as well as removing some other distractions at 2/3 height. Not too bad a result at all. AI doesn't take serious time to remove a distracting background and can produce a satisfying result that can be bettered with some further minor editing by hand.

A second wagon was produced and both are seen above, these now have a host of details added to their sides, but still some minor items are left. Shown behind one of my Kato Nohabs, this one is modified into an earlier type 53 with a new 3D-printed roof insert with air brake ventilator and its 3rd front light removed.

Some make shift colour added with rust primer and the decks in different colours due to having some difficulty of not having any grey primer and trying different mixes. Also run out of cargo wagon red-brown of course because the can turned out to be entirely dried out. The rust primer is maybe slightly too dark red but its not entirely off either, some touching up with a brush after obtaining a new can may finish the colour.

Two wagons suffice for my trial to replicate a photo like the one above from RR 21-1990 with tree transport in the Ardennes somewhere on line 163 between Libramont and Bourcy. Particularly of note is the abundance of colour on the railway banks with their high growth of weeds, generally missing on railway 'models'.

A new page on making such loads of trees is on the to-do list.

Nohab with 2 wagons loaded with trees on Splitveld Fabriek

A quick stack of snapshots of current state blended into a single image, but I think it is quite well on the way to my poster view. Actually on this image the colour of the wagons looks quite OK to me. Around 30 trees per load are used thus maybe they are still a bit too thick but shashlik skwewers seem to have only a finite number of sizes in steps of 0.5 mm. Bashing my Nohab(s) with rust and dust cannot do any harm for more realism. If you compare the images than the front windows on the Kato model seem a bit too small, particularly the lower edge and the center spoke on the cab are too pronounced. Removing the glaring alu look of the door handrails and editing the steps is easyly done, removing the Danish roofribs not. However these small shortcomings don't inhibit the very good running properties of these models in any way.

Hand crafted s-Hts of NS Dutch railways

This is one of the first wagons ever built, it has a metal floor for weight with all sides ps cladding. Design is dating from 1958 and has an intricate reinforment with posts and stretchers that is built up with ps strips and it has bogies from folded metal with plastic sides from an old FLM wagon glued to them. The original rungs of ps were replaced with stronger ones filed from square brass profile using a jig.

The steel jig, made from superfluous steel weight pieces, for filing the new rungs from brass strip to depth profile and cutting them to correct length with a jewellers saw. They are still glued to their ps sides, thus relative prone to damage by handling, thus not up to nowadays Fremo use.

Etched SM14

Image of a SM14 built from etched 0.2 mm NS sheet and obviously home turned buffers. Straight forward design in Coreldraw from an article on these in the green HP1 magazine, but my original drawing doesn't seem to have survived a series of 3 diskcrashes due to a slowly failing motherboard around that time in 2005. Hardware guarantee yes, but you don't get any lost work back with your new motherboard. This screen dump below shows the main parts from a pdf with front and back of the main etchings for the wagon body. The fold-up of the rungs seems to be missing. However, I expect that that might be still around in hardware in my stack of transparent etching films, but there is currently no drive to try to recover it.

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copyright: Henk Oversloot
date: 20 Jul 2026