Building a 1:24 scale Occre Tram Kit by John Prentice

Occre is a Spanish manufacturer of wooden kits, mostly model ships (there are over 60) but their range does also include a few trams. Not all are available all the time, you have to shop around. They are 1:24 scale and were originally designed to be fitted with an optional motorising unit for running on 45mm gauge (G-45) track, but this unit is no longer available. The wheels supplied are only suitable for a static model. To show how these kits are built, I have constructed a 1901 Berlin tram of the Westliche Berliner Vorortbahn, which operated until it merged in 1919 into the overall Berlin tramways. The model is of car 40, which is preserved. In fact, all the Occre tram kits are of preserved or heritage line vehicles. Occre say this kit is of 'medium difficulty' and takes about 100 hours to construct (unmotorised). There are detailed illustrated instructions but, although there are English translations, some parts are only in Spanish. If you want to see what you are letting yourself in for, all instructions can be downloaded from the Occre website.

The kit is mostly made of wood. This view shows some of the wooden parts. The wooden strips shown are of various dimensions but with a fixed length and have to be cut down to fit, following details given on a numbered parts list. The light ones are lime wood and the dark ones sapele. Also shown is an example of one of the eight laser-cut plywood sheets of preformed parts.

The metal parts are various tram fittings and come in this plastic box. Mostly they are castings in a hard white metal, not unlike Mazak.

The first stage of construction is the floor and the seat frames. The vertical seat fronts are a base ply section which is then covered with some 82 small strips of sapele, all of which have to be accurately cut. In retrospect, this is hardly worth the somewhat tedious effort and the ply could have just been stained or painted, as it is barely visible once the model is finished.

The seats themselves are created by adding alternate strips of limewood and sapele and then varnishing. Planking strips are added to the floors.

The ends of the saloon are made by a sandwich of ply sections. The sliding doors can be made to open if you wish.

Now to the main body. The sides at window level are pre-cut ply sections. The lower panels are formed by strips, following the shape of the ends to create the tumblehome. I added extra beading to form the waist rubbing rail, not mentioned in the kit.

The platforms. These are made from pre-formed ply parts and castings painted to look like brass. The curved parts of the dashes are made from vertical strips, filled and sanded down.

Windows added and the beginnings of building up the clerestory. The kit is supplied with sheets of acetate for the windows. I used this for the ends and the clerestory, but for the sides I used photographic plate glass as I do in 1:16 scale. It looks far better.

Now with the platforms added, we begin to lay down the strips of wood that will form the roof. Once complete it is filled and sanded down.

When finished, the roof is painted. The beams are fitted to support the roof duckboards and the trolley plank.

Prepared parts. The destination indicators and lights will be fixed to the roof. The trolley has been made from the parts supplied in the kit, although I substituted a more rigid pole. This trolley assembly is dummy since I wired the car to be two-rail as with LGB railways, but I did put a wire from below the floor to under the trolley base, hidden in the framing, in case I want to change the model at a later date to overhead pickup with a real trolley pole or a non-prototypical pantograph. The truck side-frames are a wooden sandwich with cast hornways and springs wound from wire.

The completed truck framing. As mine was going to be converted to a working model, I strengthened the section of the side-frame between the hornways with metal and the whole thing is bonded together with epoxy resin. The leaf springs are non-working castings.

The truck (viewed from below) fitted with Bachmann G-scale wheels and with nylon bushes in the hornways. The square black boxes are LGB pickups. These have sprung carbon brushes which make contact with the back of the wheels, giving an excellent electrical connection. The motor (not at this stage clamped in) is 12 volt DC of Chinese origin, sourced from eBay as are the worm gears. You need to pull one wheel off the axle and trim back the spacers to fit the pinion.

The finished model. I have added a driver and conductor from Modelu. The kit is supplied with printed paper sides to stick on (later kits used vinyls). I wanted a tram other than car 40, so I used their print as a master which I modified using CorelDraw, to produce decals for the numbers on the dashes and new prints onto glossy paper for the sides.

I hope that you find these views and notes of use and good luck with your own construction.
John Prentice.

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