Taking Stock: Goods Vans and loads

As the saying goes "have been busy" and lots of it to do with railroads both miniature and real, so lots to appear on the blog now that I'm settled for a bit.  First up on the blog is a look at my current (plain) goods wagons.  There was an article in Model Rail International 2011 (which seems to be some sort of yearly special) about the logging industry both American and Continental (mostly Austrian/Swiss and Rhb/Zillertal) but it covered making model logging loads from real timber.   I was aware of this when I engaged on the great garden tidy up and kept back some of the wood, and have added to it more recently.  One of the important things was to use wood of roughly the same diameter within a load.

I've been bidding over time on Ebay to get a number of the stake wagons - which generally seem to be in demand - at a reasonable price.  Remains to be seen if I keep all of them as logging wagons and the logs themselves still need chains etc to secure them.  The other loads get more discussion in my next post.