Warhammer 40k Armoured Train Build

This is a project that I've had at the back of my mind for a long time. Actually, the seeds were sown years ago when my brother attended a gaming event where our local game store Marquee Models in Harlow (UK) had a land train game set up with ork vehicles that were jumping onto the train to attack it. Somewhere in the back of my mind I got the idea of a warhammer train and it stuck - bubbling away back there for decades.

Recently, I've been working on my Steel Legion and the train idea resurfaced. A quick Google search revealed that some people had been able to make one successfully. A while back, I'd looked at actual scale train kits, but they were prohibitively expensive. I was basically looking for something to be used in scenarios - budget was definitely limited for this project!

A bit of Internet searching revealed this thread: https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/769594.page?userfilterid=122875 - which featured a great train built from something called a "Caterpillar Construction Set"... I looked it up on eBay and got a used one a few days later for a grand total of £10 plus postage. If you look at the thread on Dakka Dakka, it was a really involved build. I wanted to do something more simple with a focus on look and playable area. The running boards for the train were a brilliant idea  so I took that idea and sort of ran with it to increase the playable area. The train itself is perfectly in scale, but as a dodgy plastic toy, I had a lot to do. The first things to work o  was the windows at the front as the front is always the place people look first!

I also bought a bunch of plasticard bits to make railings and details with. The photo above shows how the basic shape for the running boards was constructed. I decided to make a freight type looking train and not to add guns so that it wouldn't be so much a fighting piece as a transport. I also looted my bits box for parts. I really didn't want to add hundreds of rivets to the thing, but handily, I had a bunch of flat plastic Warlord Games bases that already had a gripping side that looked like rivets, so I used those with some plasticard used to cover where it said Warlord Games in the middle of each one! 

For the 3 carriages, I have one small (in this photo red) tank which was actually an ore cart looking thing I flipped over and built a gantry on. The passenger car is next which has large playing areas added. Of all the carriages, it was the most unstable, so low armour skirting was added which is also some sort of anti roll device to stop it tipping too far on the table. After that in the distance is a mostly flat tank carrying platform which should hold 2 Chimera size tanks, although I haven't tried to size it since adding the hand rail section to the rear. There is a bunch of cheap ass looking plastic track sections too I am going to paint as well. They would actually look really good if based up, but as I don't have room to literally build a permanent train board, the flexibility of being able to lay them as is has to be king. 

All in all, I spent about a week building the Steel Legion train. I guess I need to name it now - and paint the thing. I finished 3 carriages in total plus the train, and there was a one more carriage in the set I can do at a later date along with a bunch of track.

It took quite a lot of spray to get down a decent coat of white to start working over the top of. It was fun to roughly array it once it was looking like more of a united colour. For me, the balance came out just about right- a lot of the otig9nal kit is visible still, but up-detailed and the running boards are a very usable size. 

The photo above shows the passenger carriage from the rear. I added a raised gantry with control panel to the back - the ladder on this one was already part of the kit, so that helped and saved me a bit of time. Work on  the whole train was slow in the beginning, but once I got going and had basic shapes in place it came together pretty quickly.

Pictured above is the big transport carriage which I did test later on after writing some of the text earlier and found that it will still hold 2 chimera hull tanks or similar size. Actually this was one of the more difficult carriages as it had a number of lumpy plastic details that I had to remove which was one of those jobs that could only be done with clippers and a lot of time. I did most of it while watching TV in the end.

Now that it's undercoated, it looks almost ready to cross the Ash wastes! Story wise I envisage it crossing the big stretches of Armageddon between Armageddon Prime and Secondus or the hives themselves. Hopefully, I will have time to update once I have had the chance to pit some paint on it.