DalaGStanator's Customs, Mods and Experiments

I've been intrigued by the idea to build a UK van, US boxcar or building with sliding doors and not the typical hinged types, which I find "too easy" to make. One of my LEGO sets was 7945 Fire Station, where the first floor of the middle section has a sliding door wedged between two simple grooves. Vans/boxcars with Part #4511 use that method as well. I started out with a similar chassis to the two Stroudley coaches and added two matchsticks on each side for the bottom grooves; the roof already had two skewers along the outside which helped keep the doors standing. While it did have a little too much friction, it seemed effective to me and I'll surely find better uses for it.



When I got to the side walls, however, I found there was no way to keep the existing grooves without making the sides too wide to fit the doors behind them. When looking for images of real (and model) sliding door vans, I found the 10 ton LNER ones that were often used for perishables. On those vans, the doors are suspended from external rails from the middle to one of the ends (not both). I did much the same thing I did for valve gear and used bits of tubing to make them slide along wooden sticks. Additional sticks were added through the hoops to make them fit more tightly. The roof stayed white after drying even though it was primed black and only one coat was added. I left it alone because the coaches have grey roofs and the white looks appropriate.




The brown paint was only an average mixture of red and green, yet it (unintentionally) makes it look weathered esp. in parts where a "brown" (actually dark red) marker was used for tight spots and corrections. It's currently my favourite paintjob I've done for my own rolling stock so far. If I'll do an LNER J70, it would look very similar in colour and building techniques. Even the asymmetry is less prominent compared to my earlier stock.