Railways played an important role in the American Civil War and there were even some skirmishes involving trains. Reason enough to bring tracks and rolling stock to the gaming table!
I’ve been collecting and building stuff for an American Civil War railroad for some time now. My starting point was the 15mm train from Peter Pig. It’s made of resin and definitely a gaming piece rather than an accurate model, but it looks quite nice. It fits TT gauge tracks, so I bought a bunch of those second-hand and based them on strips of plastic to provide them with rudimentary embankments.
My next step was to try my hand at scratch building special rolling stock. The first one was a mortar car. One such car, armed with a ‘Dictator’ mortar, was used by the Federals in the siege of Vicksburg. The mortar is from QRF/Freikorp15.
At the moment, I’m working on some scenarios featuring the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, one of the first African American regiments. In a curious skirmish around Jacksonville, the 1st S.C. fought against a Confederate railway gun armed with a 32pdr cannon. There are no images of this particular car, so I based my model on two photos of another such gun. Experts are not entirely sure if this is a Union or Confederate gun, but it certainly looks interesting enough and was easy to model.
I’ve not yet made a railway station building, but I’ve made a warehouse and a water tower to service the steam engine. The red brick building in the background is by S&S Models.
And finally a construction site. The handcar is scratch built using parts of a H0 model by Faller.
It was fun building those things and I’m looking forward to having them in a scenario of Sharp Practice.
The Raft 
Excellent. :Lots of ripping up of tracks missions possible like in The Horse Soldiers
Thanks! Yes, that’s the plan – incidentally, I watched The Horse Soldiers three weeks ago 🙂
Very nice work. My gaming group does ACW in 15mm, but my own railway is N-scale:
https://ncc1717.wordpress.com/model-railways/wwi-n-scale/other-n-scale/
That’s super, railways were pivotal to post mid 19th century warfare and often ignored. Who makes the 15mm railway workers/engineers in the last picture?
The workers are a mix of QRF/Freikorp15 ACW Pioneers/Engineers and Irregular Miniatures’ Work Party.
That looks great. Looking forward to seeing it in a game report.
Cheers,
Pete.
Brilliant. 😀 The gun car looks well cool and the constriction diorama is a genius way to get around having to have enough railway tracks to get across larger tables too. The handcar of course is a must.
As always very interesting and great scenic pieces!
Thanks mate 🙂
Nice display! I did a posting on Trains Of The Civil War earlier this year
I would love to read it as I am a train and CW buff.