Later in life many of the Victorian Railways wooden passenger cars had metal sheeting applied to the sides in an attempt to reduce the costs associated with maintaining the timber panelling. I wanted to replicate this to add variety to the carriage fleet and chose to model 44 BW.
44 BW was one of five 58ft BW's (No's 40 to 44) constructed in 1925. This group of BW's featured semi elliptical roofs (No's 1 to 39 had clerestory roofs). When further BW's were built in 1926 a new design was adopted, with the cars being 64ft in length and 10ft wide (as opposed to 9'6" for earlier 58ft W cars).
During early 1983, 44 BW was being used in one of the sets captive to commuter runs to Kyneton and Seymour. These sets nominally consisted of CW-AW-BW-BW and I recall regularly seeing this carriage pass through St Albans, my favourite rail fanning location at the time. By Easter it had found its way into a Bacchus Marsh sets replacing a BPL. On 31st March 1983 the 1620 Bacchus Marsh departed Spencer Street with H1 hauling 75BPL-44BW-89BPL-3AW-4CW.
To build this car I used Steam Era Models BW kit and an Ian Lindsay Models semi elliptical W car roof with SEM torpedo vents. The metal cladding was replicated with layers of styrene sheet. The sequence of photos shows how the carriage was built, basically being 3 layers of styrene sheet.
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| headboard cut from 20thou and strips cut from 10thou styrene sheet. |
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| First layer - 10thou sheet for below window ledge and panels between windows, 20thou for head board. |
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| Second layer - 10thou strips for capping. |
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| Some capping strips extended into headboard. |
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| Third layer - 1.2mm L angle for window ledge |
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| ILM roof with SEM torpedo vents added. |
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Completed sides with body awaiting under floor detail.
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| Underfloor detail added. |
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| Awaiting painting the BW with a recently completed CW. |
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