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!
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.
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.