Build an NFFX Flat Wagon
Although our HO scale exhibition layout, Broadford, is nominally set in the mid-1990s [Described in AMRM Issues 304 (February 2014) and 306 (June 2014) – Editor], we do run the occasional out of the ordinary (and sometimes anachronistic) stock to give the public something interesting to watch and possibly discuss. As we were already running a freight with a wagon load of Land Rover Safaris, ostensibly being delivered to the Puckapunyal Army base, I was therefore interested when SDS announced their TE and Centurion package, but concerned that the additional airmail and UK import costs would make the models too expensive for my budget.
At about the same time as the SDS announcement an item appeared in the Continental Modeller’s Nürnberg Report about the release in Europe of an HO scale model of a flat wagon carrying a tank model by Dutch Company Artitec. Checking out the Artitech site, I discovered that they produced a range of HO scale Centurion tanks amongst which was a Korean War Mk3 version. Having by now also discovered the Bolivia blog site [bolivanswgr.blogspot.com.au] and an extract from the Airfix Magazine which indicated that a UK Mk3 could be fairly easily converted into an Australian Mk5.1, I decided that I could make my own version of the tank on flat wagon combination and purchased two of the tank kits.
My, admittedly limited, research into wagons to carryhad no information about them and thought it unlikely that David Foulkes had any spare tenders from his kits left over that I could purchase and convert. However, during my trawling of the internet, I had come across a copy of a press photograph showing tanks being unloaded at Seymour for onward transit to Puckapunyal and as none of the wagons in it looked to me like TEs, or converted S tenders, I started looking for possible substitutes. My copy of (Compiled by John Beckhaus, ARHS (NSW) 1982) had details of a 51t capacity flat wagon coded NFFX, along with an accompanying photograph that seemed to show just the sort of prototype that I was looking for. In my world, VR had obviously bogie-exchanged a couple of NFFXs as they had no suitable wagons available themselves at the time!
