Back in 2019 I purchased a gaggle of Sarissa Precision MDF railroad pieces. I was able to get in on the their annual Black Friday deal and scored quite a bit of train for a reasonable price. I picked up a Pannier Engine as my miniature workhorse. For rolling stock I bought two boxcars (called goods wagons), one flatbed wagon, and one liquid tank car. I figured it was a good start for a nation ambiguous supply train. Once the kits arrived, I quickly built them along with the straight track, points (switches) and factory buildings I had bought.

Now these were built a little over four years ago but from what I recall the kits went together well and the instructions were easy to follow. Once the kits were assembled I gave them a prime of Rustoleum Flat Black Enamel Primer. The enamel gave them a hard, almost plastic coating that still managed to preserve the fine details.

…And then two things happened. As we all remember the world kind of shut down in 2020 due to Covid. This meant that my gaming group was not able to meet and my motivation to finish this project apparently dropped off rapidly. Around that same time I found myself enamored with the ultra modern genre of tabletop gaming. I began to collect and paint stuff for ultra moderns. Most of my World War II stuff went by the wayside and was tucked away in storage for a later date. We soon moved into a new house and the train and buildings ended up tucked away in storage.

There they sat that is until Drew, Evan, and I decided to run some events for Adepticon 2024. During one of our planning calls Drew and I decided to include a train and several factory buildings on our grain elevator table. Having five additional years of hobby experience and two 3d printers we now had several options available to us to represent the things we wanted on the table top. One of my only minor complaints about MDF kits is that you can usually tell that they are what they are. It’s easy to see that the parts were punched out of a flat piece of MDF. Since I bought these kits I also learned some new skills that would help me hide the origins of the kits with detailing and potentially 3d printed parts. That being said, the Sarissa kits are actually very well designed and constructed. While we were talking it became apparent that it would be silly for us to waste effort on printing and painting a different train. I decided to go backlog shopping and I pulled out the train, tracks, and industrial buildings. So I began the task of getting the engine and wagons up to snuff.

Of course, this meant that I also also had to order some more track and a few more rail wagons to populate our train track a little more densely. As a bonus I was excited as I needed to represent supply trains and supply depots in several of the Chain of Command campaigns I had collected. This little engine’s effort won’t be wasted as a one trick-pony.

The rolling stock looks pretty good at this point. As I said the kits are well built and work well for their purpose. The tank wagon’s axles were broken but they are not that easy to see so we will see if it warrants a repair job. The other repair I am pondering is the roof of the boxcars. I may fill the spot where the frame lugs are visible on the roofline. Other than that, a lick of paint will get these ready to roll on down the track.

I have some plans for the Pannier but I will cover that in Part Two!