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. 

Steel Legion Imperial Bombard

 

This model has been on my painting radar for far too long. I always wanted a Colossus back when they first appeared in the guard codex - I think it was 5th Edition? - anyway, they never did make a proper model. At the time, I had high hopes for a joint plastic kit with the Medusa at some stage, but it never happened. 

Fast forward several years to about 2018 when I started the Steel Legion force out of the ashes of a few failed past armies, and one of the things I knew I wanted was one of the Forgeworld Bombards. It was actually sprayed in a batch with my first Basilisk and then sort of ended up hanging around. I changed projects and it just never seemed to get finished until now. It also didn't help that somewhere in the middle it took some sort of knock during a house move that caused it to fall apart a bit.

Anyway, the tank uses my standard Steel Legion Scheme - there is a full tutorial on here somewhere, so there's not much point in recounting all the colours. It's easily found on Google under "how to paint Steel Legion tanks" if anyone is interested. 

One factor that slowed my progress on this thing was deciding what to actually do with the mortar itself. Originally the dark grey body was camouflage like the tank's hull, but it just didn't work and looked a bit too murky. The red stripes help add an accent of colour to it too. 

And that about rounds it out for this thing. I really should post more often!

Armageddon Steel Legion Stormtroopers

A few photos to share today of the Stormtrooper squad I recently finished. I've never really been a fan of when they became "Scions" in later editions, and for Steel Legion, I always think of Stormtroopers like they used to be. The original metal models they made are long out of print, and although I hope to get hold of some one day,  I'm rather happy with this unit.

These guys are actually 3D prints. I'm not much into 3D printing and don't have the equipment myself, so I can't comment on how or why these came out so nicely - I just picked what I wanted, stuck them together and painted them. I really like the old style masks though. Design wise, they take quite a lot in terms of heads and guns from the old metals, but the armour is quite different and falls somewhere between the older models and the more recent Scions. 

I tried to emulate the older scheme which was quite heavy on the yellow - in the end, I had to pick out the trousers with black though as too much yellow didn't really seem to be working! Either way, it's pretty much a reversal of my original Steel Legion scheme where the yellow of the jackets is used for the armour and other colours remain pretty much unchanged. I used some additional Scion parts for the build and the arms of the sergeant and vox trooper are both just the Scion plastic bits. 

I've been working on a lot of other units recently, so may post some more if I find the time. I've been away for so long, there's probably more painted models in my collection now that should have been posted to the blog years ago than I ever got around to posting in the first place! 

 

Armageddon Steel Legion Scout Sentinel

OK, so it's probably been at least a year since I posted anything, but not for lack of progress. I rarely have the photography lights out these days for pictures, and true to form these photos were taken in the natural light of the conservatory.

I've always liked scout sentinels- traditionally, Armageddon have the armoured cab due to the toxic environment, but it's definitely fun to see the pilot. In terms of this model, it's pretty stock, but the pilot head is swapped with a plastic death korps head so he doesn't die of exposure up there 😅

I have painted a lot of units recently, and one  of the things I've started to introduce to the Steel Legion is a bit of foliage. There are jungles on Armageddon after all, and I like the contrast of having the occasional plant in there. I'm actually using really cheap plastic plants and spraying them with undercoat and with the airbrush to get them to look good. I had the idea that the plants on Armageddon would be sort of sickly and quite yellow in colour which would explain the regimental uniform colours. 

Speaking of uniforms, this thing is yellow... it's a look I've been playing with. The majority of my vehicles are the traditional grey/sand type camouflage, but for some models I wanted to change it up. My theory being that they would have been deployed to the sands and wastes between hive cities on the planet.

All in all, I think I painted this thing over the course of a day. I've been hitting the Steel Legion stuff quite hard over the past month, so there's plenty more completed and in the works. Maybe I'll get some better quality pictures next time...