Scrap Rail Car (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets)

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (French: Tintin au pays des Soviets) is the first volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle as anti-communist satire for its children’s supplement Le Petit Vingtième, it was serialised weekly from January 1929 to May 1930 before being published in a collected volume by Éditions du Petit Vingtième in 1930. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who are sent to the Soviet Union to report on the policies of Joseph Stalin’s Bolshevik government. Tintin’s intent to expose the regime’s secrets prompts agents from the Soviet secret police, the OGPU, to hunt him down with the intent to kill.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

The story:

Tintin just turned 90!

Having first appeared in the January 10, 1929 edition of Le Petit Vingtième, January 10, 2019 marks 90 years on the beat for our intrepid boy reporter from Belgium.

Despite the fact that I have a couple of Tintin projects on the workbench, including the Udet U-12 Flamingo that rescues Tintin at the end of Tintin in the Congo, and the Arabian dhow that fishes him and his sarcophagus out of the sea in Cigars of the Pharaoh, I simply couldn’t resist doing a little “bonus” project I’ve been thinking about for a while – the scrap rail car that Tintin builds with his bare hands in In the Land of the Soviets.

After all, if Tintin can rummage through a pile of junk by the side of the road and come up with the necessary components to build a car that runs on rails, could I not rummage through the spares box and find what I needed to?  Well, that’s just what I set out to find out.  Of course, I have had that beautiful little pile of junk on my Tintin projects list for a while now, so I did have a bit of a head start.  Not much of one, mind you, basically I had a bit of railroad track and a general idea of how to proceed.

The build:

The first stop was my box of leftover bits from the Academy Alliies and Axis vehicles of WWII kit.  That box is a bit of a go-to and I’ve used bits and pieces of that kit to build both my blue and red Tintin Jeeps, the Daihatsu Midget from Totoro.  From there I pulled out the steering wheel, the gas (petrol) can and a couple of wooden boxes.  I also managed to find some wheels off the 1/76 scale M24 Chaffee kit that helped me out on the Bordurian tank project.

First off I glued the two-part wheels together and then drilled out the hole in each and added a bit of polystyrene rod as the wheel axels. Then, using a bit of “wooden deck” polystyrene sheet, I fashioned up an appropriately sized chassis plank and a small engine box. The wooden box from the Academy kit was perfect as-is for the chair, and the steering wheel only needed a bit of plastic tubing to give it the right length. Four wheels – check! Chassis plank – check! Seat – check! Engine box – check! That’s pretty much it. The only other main part is the exhaust pipe. For that I used a couple of different sized plastic tubes, one partially inside the other to create the muffler and tail pipe. For the main pipe I used a bit of polystyrene rod carefully held over a candle and bent to shape. Finally, for the stovepipe bends I simply wrapped a bit of black wiring tightly around the rod and then dipped it in CA glue to seal it all together. Voila!

Next it was time for painting. I know that Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is usually a B&W album, but for the same reasons I stated in my Soviet Monoplane build, I decided to go with the recent colourised version as my guide.

After that it was a relatively (despite forgetting to remove some paint at the contact points) quick assembly and a few of the little add ones, such as the hand crank and the candle “headlights” added to the mix.

All in all, for a 24-hour Birthday build, I’m pretty happy with my little entry to the celebration, but feel free to let me know what you think!