British N gauge wagons, goods vans.

-=- Goods Vans -=-
`10 Ton ventilated vans at Stoneybridge West.

10ton 10ft wheelbase ventilated goods van in `N'gauge. This is just one of the many available `N'gauge wagon types, there are many variants of each purchaseable wagon type, either bought as Kits or Ready to Run then painted, weathered, numbered and detailed as required for the particular railway company, line or region being modelled. It also appears to be common practice amongst `N'gauge modellers to purchase a wagon chassis kit & scratchbuild the vehicles body or fit a seperately bought Body kit EG: PECO produce a very nice 9ft wheelbase Wooden solebar wagon chassis kit which can be used to great effect with one of the available Body kits to produce accurate models of older `Pre-Grouping' wagon types that are unavailable as Ready to Run items, these are also very usefull for modellers who wish to scratch build N gauge stock, but who do not have the time to also scratch build the numerous chassis required for prototypically long rakes of stock, like coal wagons, open plank wagons, or the numerous and varied goods vans of which the railway companies built many thousands to several different `diagrams' over the years.

`A rake of vans passing Stoneybridge Shed. `Goods stock at the Stoneybridge storage sidings.
It is surprising how quickly long rakes of vans can be assembled especally since the N gauge plastic kits are relatively cheap, quick and easy to build. I have added a little bit of weight to every goods van on the Stoneybridge Railway which helps the vans to stay on the rails and behave a little less like plastic boxes with wheels and more like a hefty item of goods stock, the effect of a little extra weight on the vehicles behaviour is especially noticeable when shunting. The weighted model is less likely to be pushed away when attempting to couple to one or two vans, the vans having enough weight to force the spring coupling to move rather than the vans. The effect of weighting can be especially good on layouts with gradients, although the practice of building layouts with gradients seems to be generally frowned upon for some reason I find it gives more scope for driving the loco and controlling the train, a good stiff gradient on layout allows for such operational fun as double heading and banking of long/heavy trains ascending the gradient, banking locos returning light engine to wait for the next Up working requiring assistance, then theres the occasional extra locomotive to provide braking assistance on long goods trains decending the gradient.

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All content and graphic images on this page are Copyright ©Ozz Scott 2001, unless otherwise stated.