8: This Rio Grande Models Virginia and Truckee
Railroad kit includes laser-cut wood, together with
metal and resin castings. Couplers are not included.
Notice that the trucks are white metal and need to be
assembled by the modeler. The finished model is to be
painted and decaled by the modeler.
8
come out right. If you are comfortable with highly detailed kits,
try one from this category. Once you start building these kits,
you can see that scratchbuilding rolling stock isn’t that far away
from this level.
Now that we have looked at various types of kits, let’s check
out some construction techniques for building kits in batches.
These techniques work with any type of kit.
Building in batches – general approach
The most significant time saver in expanding a freight car ros-
ter is building kits in “batches.” A “batch” for the purposes
of this article is defined as four or more of the same kit. The
idea is to employ economy-of-scale to save some time. To
build in batches, you need to get multiple copies of the same
