Again something on the side: a French St. Chaumont tank resting next to a ruined factory with its crew. While an old fashioned Belgian dog cart passes by. Old meets new. Hence the name. The tank and factory are under construction…
Today the weather was good (at least the afternoon) , so I could work outside on the plaster factory ruin. An old Verlinden kit, which will be enhanced. The first enhancements are done. Drilling a hole for the smoke to the chimney, plus scratching and scribing brick details to the originally blank inside of the walls. Of course lots of details will be added in due time.
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I should get out more, never knew Takom produced the St.C. – nor have I seen it used in a diorama before. Great idea, bon chance! (Doesn’t it just look like a committee said “Hmm we got some spare cranes, lets stick some guns on ‘em”?) 
Merci! The French, just as the Brits did initially, used a Holt tractor (in this case, they added a extra bogie) and indeed stuck an gun to it and then build a casemate around it.
This tanks seemed to be the result of the rivaly between 2 men: Eugène Brillié, who designed the Schneider CA tank, and Colonel Émile Rimailho of the factory where the St. Chamond was designed.
The fact that it was woefully inadequate did not matter apparently. I read that the Germans, after their first encounters with this tank simply widened their trenches so it could not cross them…
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Hi Erwin,
Looking forward to following this one, I too have the Saint Chamond, and have been contemplating a WW1 build…once I’ve finished my braille scale build…thought I’d add that bit before you start thinking I’ve given up on it, 
.
Cheers, 
,
G
Thanks matey… I did read the word contemplating, so I would not have gone that way (yet 
), or did you mean the braille dio? I did see some progress on it (though I think the red is too distracting:roll_eyes:), so I had no reason to think it was yet another shelf queen.
Don’t encourage him! Remember the OJ Simpson freeway chase? Well G-man is OJ & the Diorama Po-lice are keeping formation right behind - with several unfinished projects he’s facing multiple charges of diorama interruptus
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We come from the government and are here to help you.
/ Diorama Police
Yeah, Mr. G-man certainly needs some herding to get him in the right direction…
Oh. I have this kit somewhere…
Watching with keen interest.
Welcome to the tour… have a seat and enjoy the ride 
The superstructure is very easy. Just make sure you do not accidentally fix the mg’s if you want them to be movable (getting them fit between the 2 halves of the mount was the greatest challenge thus far…)
So much different is the running gear. The returnrollers should be movable too, but the ones I did (one side) kept falling out, so in the end I glued them in place. Not really a bad thing as I won’t move it around anyway, but I like to try and keep these things to move if possible 
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I like that plaster work for sure.
J
Thanks… That scribing took me a whole afternoon… .The challenge, as with your own ruin, will be in the debris that wil be inside and outside… The chimney has collapsed, sure, but in what direction? The road in front will be cleared of course, but how many debris are left? What is still visible of the roof? What was the roofing? Corrugated, as on the box, or tiles? Windows will present a nice challenge too. I think the window frames were made of cast iron, (the box does not seem to take this in account) so where the glass might be gone, the (bend) frames might be still present… Enough challenges…
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Judging by the remaining stump of the old chimney I would assume that the chimney has fallen into the background, roughly in the direction the wooden utility pole is leaning
If the road was cleared as you say. It might be nice to show brick debris “dammed up” by a small wall of bricks. Salvaged by the locals as seen in many WWII pics? Just a thought.
J
I think you’re right… There is actually a loose part of the chimney present, but I am not sure if I use it (or only partly) .
The pole makes me wonder: why on earth would you place a pole in that spot… It would have been totally impractical and the wires would not have gone anywhere!
I want a Belgian dog cart to pass on the the road, so it had to be cleared
What part do you mean that might have been salvaged?
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You see films taken showing German and other women clearing piles of rubble. One of the things they do is take the single bricks and clean the old mortar from them with a hammer. The bricks can then be used again. When cleaned,they were sometimes stacked along the road for use or for removal. Sometimes they were even dry stacked and used as “walls” to keep rubble from falling back into the road.
Nice dog cart BTW
Some of the old Verl. stuff was cool but it made no sense. Gotta be honest.
J
I was thinking about that pole as well, totally in the wrong place
The Trümmerfrau wasn’t as common as some may want to pretend. It was mostly in Berlin and the Soviet occupied areas that women were used as labor (for food stamps).
This does not take away from the fact that roads were indeed cleared, bricks were cleaned of mortar and reused
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Good ideas. I wonder if the same practice was put into use in France /what was left of Belgium during WW1?