German Geschützwagen

History

As far back as World War One, Germany employed armored trains to protect rail shipments of war materiel across enemy-held territory. Many times these trains contained cars that were nothing more than crude combinations of open stock cars and/or armored tank turrets fixed to flatcars. Near the end of World War Two these trains began to contain more sophisticated, purpose-built cars that boasted impressive armor and an array of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. The German Geschützwagen was such a car, heavily armored, fitted with numerous light-weapon gun slits and an armored turret mounting a 10cm l.e.F.H. 14/19(p) field artillery gun.

The Kit

Trumpeter's 1/35 Geschützwagen comes in a large, sturdy box containing 11 separately bagged trees of light-gray plastic parts and a separate compartment for the single piece upper section of the rolling stock. The parts are crisp and flash-free, and effort has been made to restrict ejector pin marks to areas that are not visible from the outside. The plastic is soft and sands easily.

Also included is a decent set of decals and white stencils for a single version of the car and a small sheet of photo-etch. The 11-page instruction booklet is well illustrated and easy to follow. A separate glossy color Painting and Marking Guide is included and provides a late-war standard color scheme of Dark Yellow base under Red-Brown and Dark Green camouflage, as shown on the box-top.

There are a number of parts (40) that are not used in the build, yet none could be described as ‘significant' - pointing to future or alternate versions of the train car. Most of these are not duplicate pieces on common sprues; they are just odd, small parts. A summary diagram is included with the directions, yet there are no parts marked as unused - unusual for Trumpeter kits.

There is no interior provided, but there is a lot of wide-open-space to scratch-build one - the car is basically a hollow show-box! Each side of the car contains two sets of double doors which could be assembled in the open position to expose the interior if desired.

Interestingly, there is considerable effort put into the railroad roadbed, railroad ties, track and base, which is manufactured in such a way as to be able to be added to other tracks for possible additional rolling stock released in the future - a real potential for diorama enthusiasts. (The car can already be mated with Trumpeter's excellent 1/35 BR86 Armored Steam Locomotive.) The wood-texture of the 26 ties is beautiful, and comes wrapped in a separate sheet of soft-foam packaging material.

The ties themselves are ingeniously molded and connected in such a way that they are removed from the sprue and attached as a single piece. This aids considerably during assembly and painting - everything lines up tidy. The rails themselves are so delicately molded that they slide effortlessly into the tiny brackets molded into each tie along the entire length of the roadbed. The ejector pin marks run along the inside of each rail - out of view. Nice!

One downside of the kit, at least with my box, is that there was a considerable amount of mold-release agent that was pretty stubborn in coming off, even with 409 and soap. I ended up using a tire-clean spray-foam product which seemed to do the trick. Consequently, I had to airbrush the base unit several times, but at least I knew what I needed to do when it came time to clean the rest of the model prior to painting. After assembly, I submerged the entire model in a tub of foam, rinsed it with warm water and the paint adhered to the plastic just fine.

The Build

I started with the road bed. This is a multi-step (yet separate) process so I kept coming back to it as I built up the rest of the kit. Trumpeter gives you an option to add this track to another set of track so the first thing I had to do was to remove a section of one of the end pieces so the base would be the right length for just this kit. There are deep scribed marks on the inside of each side for doing this and after 20 seconds with my razor saw I was done. The rest of the base is snapped together and then glued. These parts are very large and I found I had to glue and clamp each section individually to minimize the seams - which are significant when viewed up close. With more time I would have sanded and filled the seams on the base, but I felt they looked okay after painting them black. The seams on the roadbed itself disappeared after painting and weathering.

The four wheel trucks went together without a problem. There isn't much detail provided here, but 99% of it is out of sight anyway.

In Step 4 you will need to finish drilling out the holes in the lower section of the car in order for the twenty-four handles (D19) to seat correctly. The holes are there, they just aren't drilled out enough to fit the handles. The small handles seem a little fiddly at first but they attach with a firm and satisfying ‘crunch'. Make sure to align the handles carefully. The holes for the larger (D20) handles are correct. Curiously, there are holes for four large handles per side, but only parts provided for two on each side, and the instructions call out for only two per side. If the artist's rendering on the box art can be taken at face value, the empty holes for these last two handles per side remain unfilled on the real vehicle.

In Step 6, the twelve doors do not have any locator pins or other mechanism to insure they line up and fit (and stay!) in the doorways - the hinges are glued on after the doors are in place. I recommend that you glue each pair of doors together on your workbench before attaching the assemblies to the upper portion of the car. I tried setting an assembly in the doorway where it was supposed to go, taping it from behind and then applying liquid glue to attach it. But when I went to attach the hinges, it popped off into the interior of the car. The only way I could insure that the doors stayed where they were supposed to was to glue a piece of plastic styrene across the opening for each set of doors, and then glue the doors to the styrene. It isn't pretty (from the interior) but it works. I feel this could have been designed better.

Also, if you follow the instructions and drill holes for the handles in parts D1 and D2 you will have to scratch-build two handles - you are only provided with enough handles for two doors, not four. The hinges are molded to have a ‘wide' side and a ‘narrow' side - they can easily be installed upside down. Easily I say! A little pre-fitting will help to insure the actual hinge falls along the edge of the door and the superstructure correctly.

In Step 7, the keyword is patience. Go slowly here - the 10-sided cupola is built up using a base containing five sides, with five additional sides attached to fill the gaps. The final assembly needs to be relatively strong because there are many items that need to be attached to it. A little filling and sanding cleaned up the rough edges left behind. The main 10cm armament is attached via a single three-sided slot - a very weak arrangement as the gun (in my kit) kept slipping out of the slot as soon as I set it in. I decided to guess at which elevation would look the best and used a whole lot of Testor's (black bottle) liquid glue to secure it to the base. I did not want that gun coming loose and rattling around after I glued the cupola to the base.

In Step 8, the main assembly of the 10cm cannon is, unfortunately, constructed of two halves which creates a stubborn seam line that will need to be filled before attaching the (hollowed out) end nub. The photo-etched bracket that slides onto the main gun assembly has a very tight fit. I had to remove the bottom molded-on bolt from the gun assembly in order to slide the bracket on. I then had no problem fitting the bracket over and on to the four remaining bolts. The entire bracket is missing from the all of the box art and the color three-view decal/painting documentation. Even the shroud is missing in all the artwork save the main box top image. I decided that I wanted both the shroud and the bracket on my train car, so I found I had to whittle a little plastic away from the inside of the shroud to make it fit around the photo-etch bracket and still mate with the gun housing - unnerving with the knowledge of how precariously the cannon is attached to the base!

I decided to assemble and attach both bumper panel assemblies on the lower car base before attempting to mate the upper and lower halves of the train car. I did this to give the two halves more surface area to use for gluing. After the panels were dry I put the whole base on a lazy susan so I could apply liquid cement around the entire car without handling it too much. Only after this was all dry did I assemble and attach the two three-sided covers from Step 9.

In Step 9, the instructions have parts D14 and D15 reversed. Ignore the part number call-outs and use the image instead. The location of how the small tabs on parts D14, D15 are supposed to line up with part D9, and how all three are supposed to fit to the bumper plates is ambiguous. I decided to glue Parts G1, G2 and G3 from Step 10 together, and once dry, glue Part D9 to the bottom of that assembly, and then glue that to the end of each side of the train car. Only after all those parts were in place could I correctly attach parts D14 and D15. This could also have been designed better.

Painting and Finish

The base and road bed: I airbrushed the railroad ties using Model Master Enamel Burnt Umber. The ties are linked together so they were easy to paint as one piece. I then painted the base using Gunze Mr. Color Black, a lacquer, which produced the satin finish I was looking for. I painted the rails a base coat of Tamiya NATO Black and then highlighted them with some Rub&Buff Silver to bring out the worn areas. Once the base was dry, I masked off the edges to leave just the road bed exposed. I painted the road bet Tamiya NATO Black. Once that was dry, I used a spray bottle to wet the surface with a mixture of white glue, diluted dishwashing soap and warm water. I then sprinkled on a coat of ash from my fireplace and let it dry. A quick brush off and blast from some compressed air and the base was complete.

Then I slipped the ties up into the base from below so that just the wooden upper surfaces were exposed when viewed from above - very handy. Finally I slid the rails through ties and attached the four rail connectors provided. With more time I would have added several other colors for highlighting and grime, followed by a dusting of various Mig powders.

The rolling stock: I usually assemble armor kits completely before painting, leaving only the machine guns and antennae off until the end. Even though the Geschützwagen appears to be one big box, it has many protruding edges and handles, etc., so in order to wash the completed model I placed it in a small plastic tub and covered it with a heavy layer of ‘No Touch Tire Care' product used for cleaning car tires. Once the foam had completely dissolved I thoroughly rinsed the car with warm water and set it aside to dry for a couple days. Next I gave the whole model a coat of Tamiya NATO Black, thinned 60/40 with Gunze Self Leveling Thinner, for use as a base coat. I like using this as a base coat for armor because it gives me the color of Floquil Grimy Black but is less fussy and feels a little more ‘grimy and grainy' to me.

I was in a quandary regarding the camouflage of the main car itself. The instructions would have me paint the car using late war colors (Panzer Yellow, red-brown and dark green). I wondered, however, what the likelihood was that whole trains were actually camouflaged in such a manner. Doing a little research I found that these trains were sometimes camouflaged, sometimes left in plain Panzer yellow, sometimes left as bare metal with some sort of primer on it. There were also pictures of whitewashed trains used during winter campaigns. When I think of trains, especially late-war trains, I think gray and dirty, so that's the scheme I decided to use on my Geschützwagen.

After the Tamiya acrylic dried, I applied a coat of Model Master Intermediate Blue Enamel following the vertical pattern that would be created over time by rain on steel. I worked up the paint until I felt just enough black was showing through along the seams and lower areas.

I followed this with a number of light passes using a variety of nearly transparent grays, light to very light, that were used to lighten up the blue to produce the worn color I was looking for.

Decals: The decals supplied with the kit were thin and in-register. There are 10 markings altogether, three Balkan crosses and seven white stencils. Even though the decals are thin they are STRONG, which is good thing because the glue is also strong - make sure you get the decals pretty well were they need to go the first time because they are difficult to move one they are down. If you follow the instructions, there is no room for several of the stencils due to the location of door hinges that are not on the decal go-by - I applied them elsewhere. I coated the areas to receive decals with Future floor polish before and after applying the decals. I used the Microscale system (Micro Sol and Micro Set) without any problems.

The build took me about seven hours to complete, split down the middle between assembly and finish.

Conclusion

This was a unusual project, no doubt. I grew up with an HO-scale train set, so the train-guy in me provided the motivation to do a full-build article rather than just an in-the-box write up. When I attend model shows I always like the big, bold diorama's in 1/35 scale encompassing many kits and figures, and trains fit into such a scenario like a hand in a glove. I applaud Trumpeter for coming out with this kit and I hope to see some similar releases in the future.

I felt that the problems encountered when attaching the doors and other parts such as the walkway housings were minor annoyances and were more than offset by the brilliant design of the roadbed and track. Overall, this kit went together quickly and provided me with an opportunity to knock out something simple and enjoyable.

I would recommend this kit. It builds into a very nice and unique representation. I'd like to thank Stevens International for providing the review sample.