Experimentation into new casualized hybrids continues here at 30Squares Labs. Our last successful synthesis was the N2HOc compound, Ramsey's Garage. Our latest is the N2Sc-9 vehicle derived from Thaddeus Lowe's personal electric rail car he used to tour and inspect his Mt. Lowe electric railway. In this case the elements to be synthesized are a Kato N-gauge drive unit, product #11-108, and a scratch built S-scale superstructure based on the aforementioned Thaddeus Lowe vehicle.
The Kato drive unit is more or less box stock. The only modification was to clip off the stock couplers and epoxy on Kadee HO scale ones. You can see in the photo that I cut off the magnetic guides that trail from the Kadees. Later the unit was painted with mixtures of acrylic rust and grey paints.
The superstructure was mocked up with cardboard to test some ideas about size. I find that when doing casualized models it's important to test the item's dimensions against figures. If the item looks ok with respect to figures, it's on its way to being a viable model. In this case I also compared the figures and mockups to the book's photos of the real vehicle with people onboard and standing nearby. In the end I settled on a deck 5' wide and 15' long, with an 8' tall centre pole to support the trolley pole. In the above picture the centre pole is only about 7' tall, and, again, after some more humming-and-hawing, I decided it was too short.
The truck side frames were built up with the same devil-may-care attitude. I drew the frame outline on a piece of card and glued up the side frames on it. They're styrene strip stock.
The rivet and nut-and-bolt details - those brown dotty things in the photo - are Tichy Train Group items. Yes, these are way too large. I think of them more as greeblies instead of detail. Like greeblies their purpose is to provide a suggestion of detail and surface texture instead of prototypically accurate representations of actual fasteners.
The control station baskets are built up from styrene strips and Aluminum Micro-Mesh from Scale Scenes. The mesh was initially held in place with dabs of Weld Bond, but later was sandwiched between styrene strips as the basket was built up.
The detail items were scavanged from a variety of sources. The trolley pole is from an unpowered Bachmann HO scale trolley. This is just a placeholder until the layout is built when I'll replace this pole with something more suitable to the layout's geometry. The brake wheels are brake wheels pried off two HO scale freight cars in my scrap box. Those springs, which when cut down are used as the front and rear springs on the car, are from a 1/24 scale AMT Moonscope kit.
Here's the superstructure being test fit on the drive unit. At this stage it's just about ready for painting.
In the previous photo I said the car was about ready for the paint shop because after taking the photo I remembered I had left off the stake pockets. They are bent up from 0.003" thick brass strips and superglued to the deck's side frames. Some of those big bolt greeblies were then superglued on to give a hint of how the stake pockets were attached.