Tea Bag Tarps
Sometime, somewhere, I heard about modellers using tea bags for tarpaulins on GYs, Victoria’s ubiquitous wheat truck (they had about 6000 of them). It might have been while watching a long train of tarped GYs on the Woodend layout in the late 1970s, hauled by a scratchbuilt X class (steam) locomotive. It might have been at that time I heard about the use of model aeroplane dope. Or it might have been a little later discussion with Trevor Doran who used dope in his youth (the model aeroplane type!) Dope is used to tighten and seal the fabric on the light-weight flying models and works well in tightening tea bag material to represent the appearance of a full sized tarp.
Photos of prototype tarps can be seen at:
•www.victorianrailways.net/freight/freight%20pages/gy/gy2.html
• Train Hobby books etc.
A few are reproduced in this article.
It was about this time that I decided I was a VR modeller, so I needed some GYs. I
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