SBB IC 2000 InterCity Train

[trainfanM]

Hello,

This time I'll discuss the revised First Class (A) and Second Class (B) rail carriages.

When I began to create my rail carriage models, what puzzled me most was which side faced me as I looked at reference photos and videos--mostly for the First Class and Second Class carriages. There was no obvious way to tell which side was which. The number of bottom windows changed for sure, but maybe this was because of rail carriage revisions?

Then last year I noticed the side panels had L and R marks on them--these can only be seen in high resolution photos. You will notice the panels are marked (from left end to right end) as 1L, 2L, 3L, 4L, or 4R, 3R, 2R, 1R. This means R notes the right side, and L notes the left side.

The left side of the First Class carriage faces us in this photo.

The right side of the Second Class carriage faces us in this photo.

With these marks recognized, I could understand what side faced me and where that side's features should be positioned. I noticed the following symmetry when I remade the models:


As can be seen, features are in the same position when looked at from either side, but with a few exceptions--as noted with the green arrows.


Here is how the final A and B carriages turned out. Except for an additional minor adjustment, what you see here are the final models.

The First Class carriage

The Second Class carriage

So those are the First Class and Second Class rail carriages.



Before I make the last entry to close out this IC 2000 thread, I thought it would be interesting to talk about the instructions that I created. I decided they would be needed since this IC 2000 model would be made public, so I looked at many examples and came away with some personal opinions. Next time, I'll give my thoughts on papercraft instructions and why I designed mine in a very particular way. Until then, here's a teaser.




Cheers!

[trainfanM]

Hello,

In this post I'll talk about my model's instructions. Instructions? At first, I wondered if such a post would interest anyone. But I think given the self-imposed constraints, the final results are visually entertaining enough.


Goals

I didn't plan to make the model files available for download when I first started. Eventually I changed my mind, and began to think about the type of instructions I would create.

At the very least I could have quick and simple text-only instructions, along the lines of "cut out A1, fold A1, glue A1 to B," and so on. But as time went on, I realized that some of the steps were quite involved and could be confusing if presented as text. A picture is worth a thousand words, so the saying goes. I considered an exploded diagram, but that really wouldn't have worked because many subcomponents need to be assembled first with multiple steps.

That's when I decided to look at instructions other people have made -- I could then have more options to choose from.

I realized my model would have broad appeal, mostly in Europe since it was a Swiss train, so I thought it would be best to do the instructions in a way which could be understood in multiple languages. I didn't feel comfortable writing multiple translations, so instructions which were more visual and depended less on words would be the way to go.



Research

I saw a wide range of instructions, both for papercraft models and consumer products. I focused on how they presented steps, and in some cases just the visual style interested me. However, I found many still relied heavily on text to get the point across.

There were three examples which inspired me the most, so here they are and what I liked about them.


1) Besta Shelf Unit 47x76"

An excerpt from IKEA's Besta Shelf Unit instructions
Assembly Instructions - IKEA

For those not familiar with the Swedish furniture giant, the company sells disassembled furniture packaged in flat boxes, which you assemble yourself. Their black & white, mostly pictorial instructions feature the product assembled at an angle. People have mixed reactions when it comes to IKEA's instructions, which I think comes from which specific ones they see.

The confusion, I think, comes from those instructions which aren't clear about what's going on in a step, which specific part should be used or worked on when there are similar parts, or maybe they try to do too much at once. IKEA's instructions are a bit uneven here and there.

I was inspired by these instruction features:

* There are a limited amount of words, although numbers and letters are OK.
* Product assembly is shown with a simple line-art style, tilted at an angle.
* Circular round or square callout boxes highlight a detail, object position, or element to note.

You can see most of these features in my page one example below.




2) 1959 Belgian Vespa Sales Brochure - In French
(the parts overview diagram)

The brochure's center spread
Scooterlounge.com Vespa Brochure Archive

This comes from a sales brochure for the Vespa motor scooter.

What inspired me here was the page four fold-out spread, which showed a two-color x-ray diagram of the Vespa's internal parts.



3) Shuttlepod Type 17
(model and instructions)

Instructions and parts page
HomespunMagixx - SciFi

Several interesting things were done for this one by Homespun Magixx.

* Symbol Key
Atop the first page, symbol and tab illustrations represent actions, which are explained with a description.

* Use of colors to represent actions
Colors are used to show specific actions to perform -- unfortunately, the colors are used inconsistently. For example, red is used to indicate both the edge to cut and area to glue.



My Instructions
With these examples in mind, I soon started to think how I should do my own instructions -- and as we'll see, I applied the examples in different ways.

1) Hieroglyphs for paper modelers
The Symbol Key idea used for the Shuttlepod Type 17 model really set the stage for how the instructions could be made multi-lingual. But to refine the idea, I thought how these could represent common and basic actions.

What are the most basic and repeated actions to make papercraft models? What symbols could represent these? Once I answered that, I had a core set of symbols which could be understood by anyone. It would only help to have text reinforcement, so I added short words to describe the symbol meanings -- although translate.google.com gave multiple definitions, I tried my best to choose the one with the correct meaning.

I also reserved the use of specific colors to indicate specific actions -- red is used to cut, green is used to fold, blue is used to glue, and yellow is to show a note. The end result was this key placed at the instruction's beginning.


I used these symbols throughout, and color helped reinforce the task. I originally only used the knife symbol, but I added the scissors because it's easier to cut curved parts with it.

So here are some examples from my instructions.


I also used letters and numbers to identify the part worked on, which at times was used to modify a symbol's meaning. For example, step 3 on page 1 indicates the fold action, but the degree markers and arrows show in what direction and how far to fold.



To glue parts, I showed areas to apply the glue and areas where the glued area would be placed against. Step 7 on page 2 shows an example of glued flaps folded against specific places.



Perhaps the best place to see my homage to the Vespa internal diagram is on page 10. In step 27, glue is applied to specific places before the outer skin is closed over it. Yellow callout circles show marks to align against the glued flap. This page is, perhaps, the most visually complex the instructions get.



2) Instruction steps

I tried to balance the number of instruction pages against how easy it was to understand and perform each step. Step 27 actually has four numbered substeps. Had I made each its own step, then I would have had more than the 14 pages I ended up with (ten was my initial goal.) Hopefully the diagram is not too confusing with the small number of substeps.

The assembly process, at several times, relies on the model's rigid structure so glued parts don't slide around. Because of that and the need for certain subcomponents to be assembled and ready, some parts are assembled and left to dry before they're needed. For example, Step 28 shows EE (a bogie brace) glued to E1 and E2 (bogies.) Although this combined part won't be needed until page 12, it needs to dry and be rigid. Assembling it now lets it dry while other parts can be worked on.


3) Number of instruction sets

While most of the carriages are physically the same and cosmetically different (like for the A and WRB,) the Bt carriage is physically different on one end. Therefore, I made one set of combined instructions for the A, WRB, BR and B carriages, and a separate set for the Bt. I also did the AD instructions separately, although I could have grouped it into the A+WRB+BR+B version -- I wanted to keep things simple, even if 90% of it was the same, I didn't want to make people jump around the pages.


4) Paper size

Because of my model's potential appeal outside the US, I also made an A4 size version of the parts pages. For those who aren't familiar with A4, this is the standard paper size most of the world uses. A4 is close to US Letter size, but it's taller and slightly more narrow.

US Letter = 8.5 x 11 inches (215.9 x 279.4 millimeters)
A4 = 8.3 x 11.7 inches (210 x 297 millimeters)

In theory, I could have made my model slightly bigger since A4 gives you more height. In practice, the A4 width is smaller so on the whole I wouldn't have had the needed width if the parts were taller -- the parts needed to be placed more closely together in width. If you don't print borderless, then the printer also needs margin room, so that's another width constraint. I also wanted to keep the same part scale between A4 and Letter sizes.

Common content area between A4 and Letter paper

After the model was completed and before I started on the instructions, I learned it was possible for A4 paper content to be printed on Letter paper without cutting things off. To do this, the content must fit within a common area.

I gave this a try since I didn't want to rearrange the instruction's content for separate Letter and A4 versions -- there was just too much content to work with. After I compensated for printer margins, I came up with a usable area. So if you want to print the A4 instructions on Letter paper, merely print out at 100% but with the borderless setting on -- I noted these two steps directly on the instructions.

For those who want to test printing on A4 paper, you'll have a hard time trying to find it at your local office products or stationary store in the US -- especially heaver weight paper for papercraft. You might find A4 paper on Amazon, but it will be quite expensive with the shipping cost. Your best bet is to get a larger size, like US Legal, and cut it down. All you need is a craft knife (like X-ACTO,) a steel ruler with metric measurements on one side (in millimeters,) and a flat surface to cut on.

This A4-Letter size trick worked with the instructions, and at some point I might redo the parts pages in this way, but for now I'll have separate Letter and A4 files.



5) File Format

The last thing I did was think about the file format.

I've come across a handfull of papercraft models that I wanted to print out in the past, but they were done as low resolution gif images. If only they were done as pdf files, then I could enjoy the high resolution my printer can output -- pdf files are resolution independent of how they were created.

However, one thing against pdf files is their color fidelity problems. Adobe Illustrator, the program I made my models in, doesn't seem to use ICC profiles for pdf. When the pdf is opened in another program, it's assigned a generic RGB profile or it has no profile at all. I devoted a lot of time to determine and use the official colors, so I wanted the colors to come out right. Color consistency isn't really an issue for the instructions since that's not so important there.

In the end I decided to save the model files out in pdf format so they could be printed in high quality, but also include color charts in png and pdf formats for color calibration. At least the png will have the ICC color profile, and the pdf can be matched against it if needed.



So that's it for my instructions post -- hopefully someone will find all this interesting or useful.

In my final post I'll talk about how I decided on the train model's composition and more -- again, the Re 460 engine will be done in a totally new message. Until then...

Cheers!

[elliott]

Most interesting post. I'll look forward to your next post, and further, to the completed model.

[DougH]

Excellent post very impressed with your anlaytical approach to the whole project. A real master class.

Many Japanese models take a similar slant on the instructions and it works particularly well overcoming language difficulties. Some other nationalities tend to ignore instructions and it's a nightmare to follow at best the numbers. Without good instructions results are bound to be disappointing.

Translation software can produce some very confusing results and peoples attention span usually means textual instructions are not often followed until it's too late and mistakes have been made.

It would have been interesting to see what the instructions would have looked like if Escher had had a hand in the design.

[trainfanM]

elliott: Thank you. I'm also looking forward to the completed model -- I still have some last-minute final (final final) versions to print, assemble, and photograph for when the pdfs are opened to the public.

DougH: That's most kind, thank you. You're right about translation software -- many times the output looks like it was written by a drunk robot. It totally misses idioms and common phrasings. I think if M C Escher did instructions it would bend backwards on itself (the last page would direct you to jump back to page one to complete the model,) or show instructions for something totally different if you looked at it sideways. :-)

Cheers!

[trainfanM]

In my final post, I'll talk about the train configurations and my plans for the Re 460 model.

Train Configurations
Besides it being a double-decker, IC 2000 is an interesting train for its large variety of included carriages (compositions, or consists.) Each composition may include certain carriages, or a certain number of a carriage type -- all this depends on the distance between city stops, that city's population, expected carriage occupancy, and either weekday or weekend travel.

In general, there are more A and B carriages for distant intercity service trains, which most likely have a BR or WBR carriage. Regional service trains are likely to have less A and B carriages -- they may also have a BR instead of a WBR carriage. Weekend service is also likely to have less A and B carriages.

The driving cab (Bt) also comes (or used to come) with several design themes outside and for the onboard family area: Jungle, Globi (a Swiss comic-book character,) Moon, Dinosaurs, and plain (no design.) Today you'll mostly find the plain or Jungle theme on the Bt.

All this raises the question of what composition to build. I guess it comes down to where you imagine the train to be going -- composition and destination are closely linked.

Switzerland is lucky in that there's a Website which follows the country's train compositions. This Website is reisezuege.ch, it's updated every year, and you can show a consist based on train number, destination, service type, and more.

Here are three examples. Since I plan to use this type of diagram in the future, I created generic icons to represent the train carriages.



What surprises me is that Luzern, a popular tourist destination, doesn't have a dining car of any type. I don't know how long it takes from Geneva Airport, but from Zurich Airport the trip to Luzern takes about 45 minutes -- that consist (IR 2637) is similar to IC 806, but the BR is instead a B -- there is no restaurant carriage. Go figure.

I guess in the end, the amount of display space you have to show off the train is kind of also a factor. Personally, my composition rests atop a bookcase -- only five carriages can fit on it (sadly.)



IC 2000 Papercraft model
My scratch-built model, except for the Re 460 engine, is now done. I'd like to give a big thank you to everyone who has stuck with this post thread over the years (Geez, it took long enough!) This free model is now available for anyone to download and build -- see my signature for more info on that -- and I'd be interested in your feedback.


Re 460 engine
I'm now gathering the final study materials for the Re 460: descriptions, photos, video, and other files. My plan is to create the traditional red livery model with a few variations -- this includes an uncolored model for those who want to create their own design.

When I have something to show, I'll make a new post to take you behind the scenes of its construction and progress.

Until then... Cheers!

[Mike1158]

Well done Sir, brilliant creation and passing it on freely, well marvelous and thanks muchly.

[trainfanM]

Thanks!

Work on the SBB Re 460 (Lok 2000) locomotive paper model has begun. Those interested can follow along in this message, as I built it over the next several months.