Wooden Standard Gauge

And now for something completely different...

I have been a woodworker and cabinetmaker for many years, so when I got into tinplate trains I looked for ways to combine the two pasttimes. But most of what I saw made out of wood for trains was pretty clunky, and I decided to learn to work with sheet metal to make and modify tinplate.

Last month I visited my friend Arno ("moderneraSG" on this forum) who has truly the most amazing collection of unusual standard gauge.  Among many other wonders, he showed me a set of wood-sided passenger cars that someone had made using Lionel 511 flat cars as a platform. They were painted, and looked to be made of maybe 1/4" luan or something similar, but they were very nicely done and not clunky at all.  So I thought, if you were careful to scale it right, and especially if you used nice woods and gave them a clear finish to show off the wood, it could work.

So these four 14-inch passenger cars are the result.  They are each made of a different wood – Mahogany buffet car, Cherry and Oak coaches, and a Walnut observation – and they are all wood, from the trucks up, with the addition of some brass railings.  Of course as I was finishing them it became evident that they needed something to pull them, so it was back to the woodshop to make a steam loco and tender.   The tender is made of birdseye Maple, and since of course this is a wood burner, it carries a load of firewood.  The loco got complicated fast, and I decided to use a lot of different woods for the different parts: the cab and frame are East Indian Rosewood; the cowcatcher is Purpleheart, and the smokestack and sand dome are turned out of jet-black Ebony; I know they look like they are painted black, but they are not.  The only paint in this project was the black tinplate CMT trucks, which also came from Arno.  All the wood has just been given a few coats of clear spar varnish; so all the wood colors are natural, no stains or paints.

It's powered by a simple Build-a-loco motor, and no one was more surprised than me to see that it actually runs!

enjoy...

david