OIT - Rail crane GWR No. 446 (1-148)

Nowadays we imagine rail cranes in construction work only or in case of rail incident, but in earlier days of railways such cranes were quite commonly used for normal cargo handling. Yard cranes able to load/unload road rail containers, with a weight of 2-6ts were fitted only in larger freight yards. In cases one or more containers did have a destination to a smaller station fitted with small or no crane, it was a common solution to use rail cranes traveling within the cargo train.

During my research I found also pictures, where rail cranes were temporary put on a free laying track piece beside the real track and were used as stationary cranes for a certain time only. So, rail cranes were a more common tool in these days, than today.

My model is based on drawing and pictures of the No. 446 rail crane of Great Western Railway (GWR), see
https://www.svrwiki.com/GWR_446_6Ton_Hand_Crane
https://www.flickr.com/photos/svr_enthusiast/8497067685/in/photostream/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/svr_enthusiast/47560929322
but similar cranes were used by other railways of course.

There is a simple carriage, meant for diorama use and a “ready to run”-chassis, meant to be used in n-scale trains. For the last one you need wheels and couplers of an PECO-wagon (I took a conflat):
https://peco-uk.com/collections/2mm-n/products/sr-furniture-removals-conflat-wagon-with-container

For fitting the couplers 2x a cab is needed. For better running behaviour of the crane there is a ballast compartment in the carriage you may fill up with some pieces of metal. I used steel balls and made a cover to close this compartment.

The crane itself is available in three versions: 1. Folded down for running in a train, 2. Erected in mid position for larger outreach and load up to 3ts and 3. Fully erected for load of 6ts with smaller outreach. The last two make sense only for diorama purpose. The cranes will be freely movable mounted on the chassis, so for a carriage that should run in a train, it makes sense to fix the crane with glue.

The model is sized for British n-scale (1:148) and 9mm-gauge, so it will run on continental layouts as usual. Rescaling for other railroad scales may become tricky, at least the “ready-to-run”-carriage will probably not work, as the wheels and couplers are specific n-scale-standard. But if you like to use the crane in an diorama, you should scale by the gauge of your track, for example:

TT-gauge, 1:120 -> would be 123%, but 9mm to 12mm gauge gives 130%
HO/H0-gauge, 1:87 -> 170% and OO/00-gauge, 1:76 -> 195%, but 9mm to 16.5mm gauge gives 183%.

All without guarantee, as I could test only the n-scale version.