The Red Armoured Train - Comrade Legoripov

I had a bit of a weird day today, setting out this morning to paint the extra figures I have almost finished for the Back of Beyond Bolsheviks but, in the end constructing an entire armoured train out of the kids long forgotten Lego collection. I'm really not sure how that happened. Anyway, having scratch built an armoured train a few years ago using a toy engine and carriages covered with strip wood and plastic card, I thought I'd take a shortcut this time as it was a laborious and somewhat 'ad hoc' process to say the least the first time around.

This is the one I made earlier...

I had used some small Lego components in the old armoured train and realised too late that I could have built the whole thing that way, saving a lot of time and effort. This time I've built the core of the train from Lego bricks and will plate it all over with plastic card afterwards, adding the various extra bits like chains, handrails and gun barrels from whatever I have at hand. I'm using the hexagonal fridge magnets again, for example, as the substructure for the gun turret with the barrel from a plastic flight stand. The bogies are from a toy train and fit the toy tracks that I have already 'weaponised'.

Comrade Legoripov inspects his technicolour train

Fridge magnet gun turret

The armoured troop carriage

I now have an armoured engine and tender, a machine gun carriage with two side firing turrets, an artillery carriage with an end mounted traversable gun turret, a troop carriage for the armoured train crew of twelve naval infantry and a flat wagon on which I could possibly mount yet another maxim machine gun, this time out in the open with a naval crew to operate it. This is the maximum allowed in the Contemptible Little Armies rules and totals up to a very respectable 500 points or so, if I throw in all of the whistles and bells and count the naval train crew as 'volunteers'.

Just don't tell the kids.