Here's perhaps my most unusual model build to date. It’s Modelcollect’s 1:72 scale WW2 Germany V1 Missile Railway Car kit which some may recall, I picked up earlier this year, at the SW Model Show at Bovington.
The parts on the sprue bore little relation to those in the instructions; with the bogies being 3 wheeled not 2 and having enough parts left over to build a strange looking finned missile and two launching platforms! Despite this oddity, it was a fun and quite a refined kit to build. The detail, for instance, in the flying bomb, is far superior to that produced by Airfix some years back. The Airfix V1 was then included in a dogfight double kit with a Meteor … I’m still somewhat bitter to this day that the second full model in that kit was one which came on a sprue of only 5 parts!
This V1 Missile Railway Car is also a bit of a crazy model in itself, having never actually existed. I would be surprised, however, if it wasn’t something that would have been considered at the time to provide the V1 with mobility. Being a flying bomb rather than a missile, the V1 needed a long ski ramp to launch making them relatively easy to locate and destroy. The V2 rocket, meanwhile, was very mobile … but that’s a story for another build 😉
As this never existed, I felt free to go with my own camouflage and so assuming the idea was not to be easily found, I went with some more of that Normandy 1944 scheme. I so enjoyed using this on the 1:35 Panther that I thought I’d try scaling it down to 1:72, something I found quite a bit more challenging.
