On My Bench: A Little Railroad Gondola
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Sprue Pie With Frets 
Nice! Way, way back when I did trains with my dad, we bought a few ‘Juneco’ kits – cabooses and some freight cars. They were of the strip wood and white metal variety. After a few attempts at these kits, it seemed to me, even back in the say, one had to be a real craftsman to get anything close to a decent finish. I uncovered a few of these kits recently as I was going through dad’s things after his passing. Too bad these were not plastic molded kits, I am sure they would have been far more popular and easy to build.
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I don’t think this kit would have popularized model railroading among plastic modelers! While it is finely molded and has some moments of miraculous fit, it is most certainly ‘craftsman’ in that the builder is expected to drill many, many holes (have your complete set of numbered drill bits on hand!); attach many, many very tiny parts using crude drawings for locations (locating holes are for wimps!); and navigate blocks of dense text that peppered by scarce, tiny crude drawings, which pass for ‘instructions’ (helps to have an encyclopedic knowledge of train car anatomy!). Assembly certainly benefits from 21st century tools and adhesives—it is multimedia in that there is wire and maybe two or three varieties of plastic. And for the love of all that is good: how did anyone build this before the availability of Dspiae/Godhand sprue nippers or sprue cutting tweezers?
Painting coming up: watch this space.
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And these Grandt kits were, and remain, among the nicest plastic model kits that model railroading had to offer. We often compare model railroading to plastics hobbies, like armour modelling, but only for the techniques and we overlook that we don’t have kits of the quality of what Tamiya or others are offering elsewhere.
But, back to fun things,
So, a Grandt kit. Either that’s a comically-large set of tweezers (which would be wonderful) or this is HO scale, narrow gauge, and what fun! Looking forward to updates.
Chris
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