Combining my interest in WW2, and my son's model railway, I've decided to build a WW2 era German Panzerzug train that can run on OO gauge tracks. My plan is to build a running train, utilising a second hand loco chassis (still scouring ebay for one that isn't too pricey) and axles (either new or stripped from damaged wagons), along with plasticard. I could make it easy and simple and convert an existing plastic kit but that's horrendously expensive. Available HO train kits tend to be resin based and cost a fortune. Scratchbuilding the should be pretty cheap, and allows for more customisation of the wagons to include. Who knows, maybe a Leopold railway gun will be included at some point in the future

First problem was finding blueprints of the locomotive and carriages, after a bit of digging around I managed to track down a copy of the Waldemar Trojca Panzerzug BP42/BP44 book which contains a few photos, but is mostly 1:35 scale drawings of the locomotive, tender, and various wagons and carriages that were used including two A1 double sided sheets.

Converting these to OO scale means having to take the engineering drawings and figure out the various faces to be used, and I've started building it up in Google Sketchup as it's a great app for rapidly drawing 3d models for checking everything looks right before starting to cut up any plastic, and there are a few plugins kicking around that can take a 3d model and convert it into a printable flat set of faces so that it can be rebuilt using paper/card - my aim is to use plasticard to build the body shells.

So far I've made a start on the basic shapes of the BR57 armoured locomotive and one of it's tenders, and here's the result from Sketchup.