Narrow gauge goodnes

[KvadratGnezdo]

"Did you want diesels? Of them lots I have" - probably MPS sometime in the 50s

SO... I have been missing for a while but for a reason! I was collecting data on the most obscure things of all time that not many people dare to learn about: narrow gauge railways in lego form (8 stud compatible in my case). You see, if you are not from central Europe or NA you've probably rarely thought about how weird and obscure the world of narrow gauge railways actually is. So, without more of wasting your time - narrow gauge of the certified Empire of Evil .tm - USSR. In the Union AND later, Russia, narrow gauge was used when even the light profile wide mainline rails weren't usable due to landscape issues, nature of industry (logging operations and peat harvesting) and overall cheapness of the whole operation - the entire line could be theoretically quickly disassembled and then transported somwhere else/scrapped via normal automobile roads. Here I am slowly going to post the majority of *mainline* narrow gauge stuff that is generally known about, because again, obscure thing.

Youth railway training center and TU2 mainline diesel engine with Pafawag cars

TU2 and M62  sitting together and looking cute

How it usually looks - probably TU8 with 4 PV40 wagons

The workhorse(s)

TU series (not to be mixed up with Tu tactical and strategical bombers family) decypher as Тепловоз Узкоколейный aka Narrow gauge Diesel engine. These numerous engines can be found all over the former Eastern Block countries and generally divide into two categories - passanger/training engines TU2 and multitask motor platforms TU4-TU8 "Loggers" aka "Farties". All are diesel with purely mechanical transmissions that can be observed on TU6 for Example. All but TU2 are dirt cheap, easy to maintain and produce. And this is exactly the reason  most of them look like something made by orks from warhammer.

TU4 looking relatively better than some of its kind. 

And now moving to my Lego interpretations. I've made a 6 stud wide static model of the TU6 engine in a multitude of liverys (there is a ton of them look it up). 

TU6 is a mainstay up to this day with some of these aging up to 40 years or more. This engine was upgraded to TU6A variant and is loved and cared about by enthusiasts when found. These were primarily used later during the Soviet period for delivering lumber and peat for and from corresponding facilities all across the country. They were equipped with a single buffer (more than most soviet engines at the time) and an added chain and hook coupling that connected directly to the buffer. The engines were one of the rare examples of russian and soviet trains not recieving outer safety bars along their frame except the long ones at the top. Their further mod the TU7 was a wierd testbed for modifications - using new coupling tipes, like the mighty SA3 and even more primitive hook and chain ones, wide gauge bogies which led to an odd TGM40 wide gauge shunter program and so on and so on. The definitive difference between TU6/8 and TU7 are the "underslung" tanks that are clearly visible on the pic below.

Said wide gauge mod with SA3 onboard somwhere in Ukraine

The Lego form - Youth center mod with added buffers and SA3 mod completely without any.

The logging stock
Logging flatbeds as says the "Forestry and Logging narrow gauge rolling stock sourcebook" were mostly comprised of class LT-22 and TsNIIMEDVE  articulated flatbeds carrying weights of 22-24 tons each with the exception being class T-55 that could only hold twice less than that and combined stock. Flatbeds were made in gray, brown, black (state owned) and green (rented by state owned semi-private enterprise) liverys. Due to the passage of time, wierd customisations and poor maintenance most of them look like that now.

And the corresponding lego forms, including a small logging train.

 

That's all for now and I will probably rework the roofs.

Edited December 5, 2020 by KvadratGnezdo

[Paperinik77pk]

Great work! I love these locomotives, especially the Ty2! And your Ty6 is amazing! I really like this rolling stock and I've always watched videos on Youtube featuring these machines, one in particular features the Blue Ty2 in heavy snow with a  snowplower. Spectacular!!!

[LEGO Train 12 Volts]

Great design for the locomotive and lovely narrow wagons!

[JintaiZ]

Nice build! I'm very impressed with the accuracy!

[KvadratGnezdo]

15 hours ago, Paperinik77pk said:

Great work! I love these locomotives, especially the Ty2! And your Ty6 is amazing! I really like this rolling stock and I've always watched videos on Youtube featuring these machines, one in particular features the Blue Ty2 in heavy snow with a  snowplower. Spectacular!!!

 

14 hours ago, JintaiZ said:

Nice build! I'm very impressed with the accuracy!

 

15 hours ago, LEGO Train 12 Volts said:

Great design for the locomotive and lovely narrow wagons!

Thanks everyone!

[zephyr1934]

An educational historical tour via your excellent MOCs

[KvadratGnezdo]

4 minutes ago, zephyr1934 said:

An educational historical tour via your excellent MOCs

Oh, that is just the beginnig, there will be around 5-7 updates to this at least and thanks for feedback!

 

[KvadratGnezdo]

NGG Part 2

Logging freight part 2 - the utilities

Basically a logging railway won't run with just logging cars - everyone needs supplies, heavy equipment and fuel (or other liquids for that matter) so for every narrow gauge railway a certain number of freight cars was dispatched. Usually these were: boxcars, flatcars and tankers. There are hundreds of variants but this time I will stick to the 60s and later era for refference as anything prior is a dark forest full of wierdness and mysteries. These wagons were produced by the same plants and on the same production lines as wide gauge rolling stock and thus they have inherited a certain number of parts and mechanisms that were originally made for larger wagons. Also it shoud be noted that for every officially made boxcar there would be one made by combining a flatcar with a toolshed (but that is what we generally love them for). 

Flatcars. Even the unofficial models usually resembled or were based on the next three universal models: light skirtless PLM-10, medium logging flatcar LT-14 (which used to be stripped and used as regular flatcars for a long time that is why it's mentioned here) and standard class 233/43-1-- with folding metal skirts. There is nothing special about them really, well, aside from the unofficial motto "carry all from tractors to coffins". Also, some of them were modified to be used as break vans and it looked something like this:

Yeah, it stops halfway and then it's just naked frame.

And the lego forms, from smallest (PLM) to biggest (223):

Boxcars are just more of the same - most are wooden or converted from 223 flatcars by local handymen and some still have original metal plating. The ones mentioned here are the goods variant as there also exist firefighting variants, army mobilisation variants, grain hoppers and so on and son (more on those later). The base model is called 219S, the metal one, but other similarly called 219s exist, but they differ from the original one as they were made with cheaper materials and components to reduce maintenance cost.

Boxcar nesting doll

Firefighting 219 variant - it even says so on it's side + overloaded and "modified" LT-14 at the back

Lego version

And lastly (at least for today) are the tankers. Tankers are boring as they are least fit for field mods and lack of maintenance, so there is only a single designated tanker class - VTs 20 "Sausage", which did quite well when it came to transporting liquid goods and this is why it's boring. My take on it features a reinforced "mod" frame and additional broken ladders (as there was info of such variants existing without any actual pics).

Take this one with a grain of salt - a more canonical "sausage" will be shown next time

Yes, that one.

Bonus pics: updated TUs and a small freight train:

Next time: PEAT! and sausage

Edited December 6, 2020 by KvadratGnezdo

[KvadratGnezdo]

Canonical sausage

 

[ColletArrow]

2 hours ago, KvadratGnezdo said:

Canonical sausage

Now there's two words I never expected to read consecutively on this forum! 

I love what you're doing here, presenting each model with a brief, detailed and engaging history. Each wagon has excellent detail and some nice parts usage, and trains you're building up look awesome together.

Good work so far, I'm looking forward to whatever's next!

[KvadratGnezdo]

7 hours ago, ColletArrow said:

Now there's two words I never expected to read consecutively on this forum! 

I love what you're doing here, presenting each model with a brief, detailed and engaging history. Each wagon has excellent detail and some nice parts usage, and trains you're building up look awesome together.

Good work so far, I'm looking forward to whatever's next!

Thanks!

 

[KvadratGnezdo]

NGG part 3

PEAT!

So, if you know what that stuff actually is, you can skip this part and go straight to the models (but I'm not forcing you to). And now for non-skippers: peat is literally a tipe of flammable mud - cheap, replenishable and can be found in most swamps across the world. Before USSR and Russia were dependent on oil and natural gas to keep their economys going - there were major energy shortages after the WW2. Imagine this - you are in post-war USSR. You have no money, most southern coal mines and oil rigs fell victim to scorched earth policies employed to slow down german advance and disrupt their supply chains. And siberian oil fields aren't much of a thing even to this very day so you need a placeholder. And there you have it! Peat! It is easily flammable, quickly replenishable, lies almost on the surface of traversible soil, is plentiful and not very dence. So you build an entire industry around this natural resource all across the country with your agricultural program not being a disaster like collectivisation, invasive killing weed, evaporating seas or trying to grow corn in a middle of a literal desert (more on that later). And then the 90s happen - almost all of the industry you've built goes bankrupt, 80% of established facilities are not properly conservated and you are left with hundreds of square kilometers of easily flammable dry soil under the hot sun. And then the "Infernal" 2010 happens:

Now to the 2 new things I wanted to show.

The workhorse, bur earlier

TU4 is considered the first of the universal diesels to recieve hooded design with the cab being moved to the side. A truly useful engine, produced in the hundreds, cheap, tough as nails e.t.c. Most of them nowadays are either scrapped or exist as museum pieces with some continuing their work in a rather miserable state of disrepair. There is not much to say about this thing really - it participated in two failed agriultural programs and was pretty good at what it was doing. Many variants exist but most differ in terms of handrails, windows and lights configuration and the tipe of exhaust pipe being used. Also some of the earliest TU6 units had almost the same overall design as TU4s which makes figuring out what exactly are you looking at a bit harder.

TU4 as is with painted over windows and a fresh paintjob overall

Lego form with variants:

And now, the peat wagons.

Peat hoppers class TSV-6 are a family of narrow gauge hoppers intended for carrying peat collected by peat harvesters over to the powerplants where it was used as, well, fuel. All cars share the overall scheme and most of the components necessary for their propper work, but vary in the quality of materials used (from steel to wooden planks) as do most freight narrow gauge wagons. Interestingly enough, despite being made to haul relatively lightweight peat hauls these units with propper mods and probably siding cuttings could be utilised as gondolas and what's even wierder - these weren't classified as hoppers from the start, but as gondolas. Wierd.

IRL

Metal one (at the back) and wooden one (at the front)

That is all for now, tomorrow's update will be just different trains, and an easter egg that nobody will get. As a bonus - self propelled vacuum peat harvester:

Looks like something from cnc

Edited December 7, 2020 by KvadratGnezdo

[ivanlan9]

Just to clarify:  the prototypes are all 750mm guage, correct?  About 2.5' Imperial.  And you're building 6-wide models on standard Lego track, so that would make them what scale?

Excellent work on all these, by the way.  I like Russian diesels, and these are especially entertaining.

Metta,

Ivan

[KvadratGnezdo]

4 hours ago, ivanlan9 said:

Just to clarify:  the prototypes are all 750mm guage, correct?  About 2.5' Imperial.  And you're building 6-wide models on standard Lego track, so that would make them what scale?

Excellent work on all these, by the way.  I like Russian diesels, and these are especially entertaining.

Metta,

Ivan

Considering the fact lego stuff tends to be disproportional by design i tend to use a standard lego man figure as a measurement unit while counting his height as about 1.8 meters. Making 3 or 5 stud wide tracks is a pain so I try to find compromises - this hobby is not exactly fit for rivetcounting. So, basically, I try to make them in scale with lego minifigs.

[KvadratGnezdo]

Vitalya [1Vi ~ 1.8 m], my everloyal universal unit of measurement next to a "sneak peak" DT-54 tracked tractor - it will come in handy sometime in the future.

"Trakhtor cures all illnesses!" - there goes the easter egg

[brownie5968]

The yellow and dark red tu-4 is beautiful. Some of the most comprehensive narrow gauge builds ive seen with all the colour schemes, different locos, different rolling stock etc. Love them!

[Feuer Zug]

Wonderful builds. The biggest issue is the LEGO renders are in far superior shape to the real thing.

[KvadratGnezdo]

44 minutes ago, brownie5968 said:

The yellow and dark red tu-4 is beautiful. Some of the most comprehensive narrow gauge builds ive seen with all the colour schemes, different locos, different rolling stock etc. Love them!

Thanks!

 

Just now, Feuer Zug said:

Wonderful builds. The biggest issue is the LEGO renders are in far superior shape to the real thing.

Yes! Where are my bent pieces and burnt out colours LEGO? And why can't I choose a matt finish? All the models I make look wet!

[KvadratGnezdo]

Small update with two consist mocs that are related to the topic above. I mean peat.

First up is just a nirmal empty train with 8 hoppers one of which is actually a break car! Yeah! Even though i hate break cars  in general (most of them look like a doghouse glued to a normal wagon) building it was kinda fun actually. Other interesting things include hoppers without the reenforcing outer frame which were popular at the time before metal started to run out of structural integrity.

And the break car at the back:

Now the second one is much more interesting because of the loads it carries. Firstly there are 2 DT-54 "Dinosaur" tractors and the giant samovar-tank thing at the very end - is a towable peat tanker/harvester that was often paired with tracked tractors to drag it across the muddy terrain to collect the flammable soil. Also it looks like something out of early star wars and I just love how it looks.

Together for half a century and the pepelats in general doesnt even have a codename nor a nickname. Moving over to the train:

That is all for today and now not one, but TWO WHOLE BONUSES:

ALL HAIL THE CORN TRAIN + subtle foreshadowing and a roadmap full-o-spoilers:

 

[KvadratGnezdo]

According to the roadmap we should be somewhere around corn and quarry and so I shall continue. 

NGG Part 4:

Let's talk about the corn madness. Khruschev loved corn as it was deemed to be a cheap and plentyful and not really specific about the places for it grow food resource. And it started an entire movement in the soviet agriculture that centered around repurposing fruitless semi-deserts of Kazakhstan (for example - there were many other attempts in different regions) into endless cornfields, which, when you think about it, was not a bad idea at all. But if you remember correctly - I've listed this initiative above as a general failure. So what went wrong? Multiple factors - climatic anomalies, that halted any propper irigation projects during the planning phase, overextention of supply chains and equipment shortages - it left huge holes in the budget and almost zero progress made, and thus, what has been done was kept, but unfinished soil enrichment and extencive animal breding in certain areas has led to massive erosions and overall desert advancement, which was not that much of a shock really. Up to this day Kazakh and Russian activists are slowly but surely reversing the damage done. One of the more positive outcomes of this agricultural program was Nikita's corn obsession, which led to him recieving the title of "The Great Cornholio", when Beavis and Butthead was broadcasted in the 90s Russia.

He was a simple man with a simple dream...

Now, lets go over to the trains! Narrow gauge was utilized (obviously) as a cheap mean of quickly transporting food and other goods to and from the "elevators" aka grain silos, fields and storage bases to small worker villages, other storage bases and silos and even factories, where they were utilised as a less spacy alternative to normal railways. When it came to the cars themselves there were no big surprises anuway - converted boxcars with additional loading hatches on the roof and sometimes on their sides were the backbone of most consists on the railway together with normal boxcars and gondolas. They were called the same way as standard boxcars - class 219 with the second numerical index meant for different builds and tipes.

The best pic I could find honestly

Secondly there were narrow gauge refrigerator cars of class Bautzen kühlwagen / Waggonbau Bautzen aka Bautzen. And yes, they were built in the Eastern Germany. Interestingly enough, USSR or any other satellite nations never attempted much of their own specific refrigerators which is understandable when you figure out how the economy functioned at the time. Only a couple of variants existed, one of which was a break van and the other was meant for 1520 standard as a small scale production series.

Moving to Lego

Guess which one's a refrigerator

Next post will be big as it will finish the industrial theme, as well as introduce the experimental TU9/10 engines as well as hoppers and gondolas; a little preview:

 

Edited December 9, 2020 by KvadratGnezdo

[Phil B]

Your train builds are great, but the stories are what make your posts fascinating. Keep 'em coming!

[Reker1000000]

I love the detailing and the stories behind the models!

[KvadratGnezdo]

NGG Part 5 - I don't differentiate between sorts of gondolas

Finally, lads and ladies, finally I've made it so far, that I can actually look at something and feel mildly satisfied! This will be the last post regarding freight wagons of standardized design - drug addict's wet dreams aka field mods: stripped boxcars turned into car transportes, sauna cars and other hybrids will wait a bit. I want to build something other than brown basic shapes, for example, green basic shapes, so the next post will probably be about the TU2s and their multiple non regular uses, their unfamous cousins and some history. But let's finish the cargo section with the most versatile wagon tipe - gondolas and their mutated versions - hoppers and dumpcars.

Gondolas! Everyone knows how gondolas are made, what for and how, so lets jump to the classification part. The unified look of the soviet and post-soviet gondola is what we tend to call - a mystery. You see, there are no predetermined gondola classess intended for ng, instead most of them were either reclassified as flatcars with raised sides on which respective frames they were built, or fieldconverted from said flatcars using hammer, nails and welding torches. So you can look at the flatcars above and compare them with the gondolas (also shown above but also) here.

With a small exception being the light blue class HD-1 hopper out there in the middle.

The second photo pictures both (UVS-20 and UVS-22) "modern" dumpcar variants used on tne 750 mm ng up to this day and a class PDB hopper car. Interestingly enough, because of their finctionality, cheapness and the fact most of big steelmills and quarrys use narrow gauge as the main means of transporting large amounts of resources updated UVS-22's are still in production and have a new cool black colour scheme, just like mainline dumpcars, which is a fun coincidence (or maybe not).

UVS-22 (above) and class 34-9023 or maybe 2VS-180 (below). As I've said - coincidence.

\

Lego versions and a train:

A weird bouns one

Ummm, okay. The TU lineage starts from a lowly TU1 whuch was a semi-experimental diesel engine for the standard narrow gauge and is currently ending on TU-10, a purpose-built training engine for DZhD youth centers (we will talk about them too, as said on the roadmap), and I've already presented the TU8, which is still working and recieveng updates and upgrades. As you can see - there is a missing link in this 750mm chain. TU9. An engine so obscure and forgotten, that there are only two pics of this thing online with one of theme being a simplified blueprint and the other being a black and white photo in so-so quality depicting the two out of four engines ever built.

Yes, and engine from a TU family that was not just some 750 mm gauge diesel, no. It was a 900 mm gauge experimental wunderwaffle of a mining vehicle that to this day remains one of the Russia's narrow gauge railway mysteries. There is little known of any unit's fate or current whereabouts (most probably all of them were stripped and scrapped) but there is some dubious info floating around sorounding its nickname."Drish" that roughly translates as "Helminth" as the vehicle in question was long and narrow, painted in light colours and traversed dark, narrow and wet tunnels deep below the... Yeah, I'll see myself out.

Lego version, extrapolated of the two existing pictures and the classic industrial livery

Technical Break!

Edited January 23, 2021 by KvadratGnezdo

[KvadratGnezdo]

Preview:

[zephyr1934]

What about this for above the doors