NZ120.org

Hi all,

As you may have noticed NZ120.org is now offline. I've kept a copy myself and the National Archives has a copy for posterity.

For the plans previously hosted on the website, please see the "Plans" page.

The Future of NZ120.org

I now can't access the NZ120.org site to post this message... but I've decided the website will come offline mid-June. The domain will redirect to my old blog (you're looking at it) with a message about the site (i.e. it's now offline but you can see the -plans etc). If there are pictures etc you've got on the website that you want to save, please save them before the website goes offline.

All the plans etc have been moved to a Dropbox folder I've created, which you can access via my old blog:

https://nzr120.blogspot.com/p/plans.html

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the website over the years. I'll be updating this blog sporadically.

Moving to NZ120.org

I've taken over as the webmaster of NZ120.org, so I won't be blogging here from now on.

Silver Fern II

Off to the paint booth for the Silver Fern prints:

 A commenter asked recently what I use for primer - I use Repco's Etch Primer spray. It doesn't contain the solvents other etch primers I've used seem to have (I'm guessing because it's meant to be used on cars, which these days have a lot of plastic parts).

Video o'the month

Silver Fern I

Finally got started on my Silver Fern model from Peter's Shapeways print of the RM class.

First step is the usual Acetone bath and scrub down with a toothbrush. 

A pile of bogies

Acetone bath

Cleaned up nicely

Second step was letting it dry off... and putting it back into the box, where it'll probably sit until I find time to do something about it.

From the "what might have been" file

Stolen from NZ Rail Geography, posted by Andrew Hamblyn.

The above plan showed up recently on the NZ Rail Geography group - from the what might have been file. It's a plan for a wagon to carry iron sand for NZ Steel from their Waikato river iron sand mining site to their steel mill at Glenbrook.

Every foamer worth their salt knows the old Waiuku Branch in south Auckland, a typical rural service branchline, was closed in 1967 only to be reopened in 1968 with a spur to the then new steel mill at Glenbrook, and sees some heavy freight these days - coal and lime inwards and steel billets for export outwards. The remaining section between Glenbrook and Waiuku was closed, only to be reopened by Glenbrook Vintage Railway. What I never knew was that there was a proposal to use rail to move the raw unprocessed iron ore from the mining site to the mill. However locals objected and a slurry pipeline was built instead.

Still, this would make a pretty cool model. Looking at the plans above it appears the intention was to use a rotating unloading system like this one:

Pretty cool. The wagon design itself looks a lot like these old WAGR iron ore wagons used in Western Australia: