Sachsenmodel produces most of them in HO. Eisenbahn Magazin did scale drawings of them a couple of decades back, along with several reasonably detailed articles.(in German) I will have the articles somewhere in my 20 year stack if you can't get info closer to home. From memory Sachsenmodell does the HSO, LSO, flat, Van and Guards van.
There are a few photos on Paul Bartlett's excellent site- one of one of the few surviving open wagons (these were supplied in kit form from the US and assembled in France or the UK), and some of the 'Warflat' bogie flats. It's worth bookmarking this site, as Paul's continually updating it. Slightly off-topic, at Expometrique this year, I was looking at a book on French railways during the 1944-5 period. One shot was of a couple of tracked tractors (possibly bulldozers) towing a WD Drewry shunter up one of the beaches during the very early stages of the landings- make a nice diorama for the 'prototype for anything' boys. There's a book published by Oxford Publishing, called something like 'Freight Wagons and their Loads of the Great Western Railway and the Western Region' which has some shots of trainloads of tanks and possibly other vehicles. Tourret Publishing has done some stuff on WD stock, but mainly locos. In France, it is still possible to find WW1 stock, originally supplied by the US Army Transportation Corps, in use as service vehicles- these were taken over by the French Government and became known as TP stock. Curiously, the WW1 stock was mounted on diamond-frame bogies, whilst the bulk of the WW2 stuff was 4 wheel.
No- apart from the various locomotives supplied by the USA, large numbers of wagons were shipped as CKD 'kits' (imagine IKEA with 'flat-packed' wagons..) The American-supplied vans looked pretty much like the pre-war '8 chevaux/40 hommes' types, except for the material - plywood- which was novel in France at the time. There are still a few of these around in France in the service fleet- an SNCF friend pointed out one in use as a store at one of the intermodal yards in the Paris region.
They are nice models, aren't they ? I saw one of the low-sided ones at Frethun a few weeks ago in an engineer's train- it had received roller bearings, but was otherwise unchanged. Other surviving ex WD/USATC stock that I've seen over recent times in France and Italy includes centre-cab GE '44t' at various CFTA sites, along with a jackshaft-drive ex WD 0-6-0 (BR used similar locos until the late 1960s) and Whitcomb bogie centre-cab shunters in the Arezzo region of Italy. Brian
The World War Two Raiway Study Group of which I am Secretary can provide the information you are looking for, contact me direct. Our web site at
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has an article on Warflats used to carry tanks.
Apart from the various tank carrying wagons, and the American kit built ones, mots of the specifical WWII wagons were adaption of exixting designs. For example holes cut in the floors of open wagons and then cradles fitted for 3 blades aeroplane propellers.
I found a diagram in the letters page of an early Continental Modeller (1990) with a refernce to a previous CM article while I was looking for something else
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