SPA Modeler

I have been puttering away on this for a couple of weeks, and as soon as the sub is finished I will give this build most of my attention. I wanted to do something fun, interesting, and different, and this seemed to hit all the marks.




The kit seems decent enough considering it is now about 25 years old, and should be a relatively straightforward build.

The first steps covered building up the lower chassis.



Followed by adding the details to the sides of the body before assembling the flat sides to form the superstructure.



The sides went together well, taking care to make sure they stayed aligned while to glue dried.


The turret went together nicely too. I had to fill the locating dimples for the forward vision ports on the forward sided of the turret. I used a piece of Evergreen strip stock followed by putty to fill and blend the dimples into the turret sides.



And finally the major parts all sat together to see how it’s going to look.



Next up will be attending to some of the details and joining the major components together.

I'm having a hard time seeing how such a thing could be used.

It looks to have some sort of motor, so I would say that it’s used for security patrols along railway tracks against partisan sabotage or ambushes.

That’s a unique project Scruffy! I’m curious to see how this turns out.

Yes, these were built late in the war and were each individually motorized and suppose to operate in trains of 12 or 14 cars. There were also infantry carriers and a command version built as well. DML also has kits of those as well, which I do not have and am trying to resist the urge to acquire , although I did build the command version back in the day when these were first released, but it is long gone. Also planned were flak cars for protection against allied strafer aircraft. Depending on the source there were to mount a Flak 38 on an open mount, or a turret such as a Werbelwind turret, though these were never built. Photos show at most show trains made up of about six cars at the most.

Yeah, I am curious to see how this turns out as well Stik

I love these German rail builds. I've got a few in the stash along with a BR52 and a Leopold railway gun

Yes, everyone did well explaining the use of that car. It was also used in pairs or threes to scout out the rails ahead of an armored or supply train to see if the tracks had been damaged or to check for possible mines on the tracks.

Excellent progress on that little thing. That is one type of rail car I hadn't ever built. I did the Br-52, Br-86, armored engine, shuttle engine (twice), Both Leopold and the Morser Karl being transported by rail, an entire Panzerzug BP-44 armored train and of course... Dora. All of them in 1/72 scale.


Looking forward to seeing more on this!

Looking forward to seeing this one...

Mean looking thing!

Very interesting!