Modelling a Steam Fire Engine

In my previous post, the 1910 Waterous horse-pulled steam fire engine was highlighted, found by an intrepid Whig photographer to still be in service at Cohen's scrap yard. Well, I have a scrap yard on my HO scale Hanley Spur layout, so today I decided I needed a quick model-building project/fix so I spent a couple of hours building a version of that fire engine for the layout. Nominally, the signs at the scrap yard say KIMCO, and the Cohen scrap yard that actually had a CP spur was located west of Rideau and south of Railway.  But I had about 60 square inches of space that could accommodate a scrap yard, so here it is.

I printed off the Whig photo and some clip art images for modelling inspiration. I don't work well with a computer image, and it's way too easy for me to clumsily get paint, styrene pieces and other modelling detritus beneath the laptop keys, hence good ol' paper to the rescue. My next step was to go through my scrap box, as well as my sets of plastic drawers in which I organize useful parts collected over the years (top photo).

• I had the front set of spoked wheels and tongue from a soft-metal grain wagon I'd never built. 
• The back wheels were saved from an antique toy car. They looke like rubber tires, but they're the only ones I had, and ya go with the army ya got. I did not want to destroy my Airfix British World War I artillery piece just for this project!
• The boiler is a toy fire hydrant from a dollar-store set, with the rounded top Dremel'd off. 
• The chassis is made from sprues that I cut, filed and glued together to produce that classic gooseneck profile.  
• The driver's seat is a piece of picket fence bent on the edge of my table. 
• The driver's controls I saved from a toy car that my grandson recently broke them off from.
• The spare section of hose is a piece of styrene sprue that also got the edge-of-table treatment.
• The back steps are from a structure kit.
• All the other parts are from the scrap box, glued together to look 'right'.

The paint job is imaginary, as the prototype photo is black and white. Again, I painted it until it looked 'right'. In future, if I have room, I'll position this relic in my model scrapyard and have a worker processing the batteries to make money for Cohen. Because who knows, maybe it was still there in 1970!