Pontoon Bridging Set

Well the few days in Central Otago are gone and we are back home. Christmas Day and Boxing Day were a little cooler and overcast than Christmas Eve, but yesterday the skies were blue and a gentle breeze blew up the valley, over the vines and past the lodge...

...it was shaping up to be a stunner...and we were leaving to go home...

By mid-afternoon we were back in Auckland where it was warm, the skies were equally blue, but the wind was gusting to gale strength, and I spent the evening finishing off the pontoon train set that I started a week ago. 

The set consists of the engineer officer and the four pontooniers carrying beams...

The wagon, with timbers stacked for transport...

The wagon with the pontoon loaded...

And then with the horse teams that I had painted a month or more ago.

The whole set goes nicely with the pontooniers and the pontoon bridge set and workmen that I worked on back in September (here).

The Pontoon Bridge

As a part of my current rash oddball projects I have made up a pontoon bridge building set.

I have wanted to do something like this for a long time and have eyed that Renedra pontoon bridge since it was first released maybe eight to ten years ago. Well finally I bought one...actually I bought two, because it can be built as just a wooded bridge and I figured I might have a need for one of those, but it will probably just sit unassembled in the spares area for a couple of years.

But the pontoon bridge alone was never going to be satisfactory so I bought the Perry French Napoleonic bridge builders set as well.

You can almost imagine that this shot is taken at a standup at the Grand Armée Annual Conference and the officer is saying "Good morning everyone, my name is Colonel Pivet and I would line to introduce my team: to my left is Captain Delafont, who is on secondment from the staff and whose interests include bridge building, travel, ornithology and cordon blu cooking; to his left is private Arnoux, who is the comedian of our group and likes nothing better than serving up exploding croissants to his teammates..."

I mounted them all on 20mm Renedra plastic bases, carving wooden planking into the bases for the three sappers that will be working on the bridge. The officers were given grassed bases, figuring that they probably would be observing from the bank anyway. The two lads in the water could have been left without bases, but they would likely get lost or damaged so I put some water texturing on the base and let them have a swim.

When put together with the bridge the figures make an impressive scene. Clearly this bridge is being built across the Blue Danube, although it was more brown than blue when I saw it.

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The officers are very happy with everything  and are deciding where to go for coffee.

To further enhance this scene there is a set with a pontoon wagon with four more workers and various pieces of equipment, but sadly it was out of stock when I ordered these so it will have to wait for another time.

French Artillery

The weekend saw the completion of two French Napoleonic gun sets.

The first is a foot gun loading.

The second is a horse gun sighting the piece.

Next up is a pontoon bridge and its construction crew.

Paint Your Wagon

Say the names Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood and you think of tough guy films like The Dirty Dozen, the Killers, Dog Day, Dirty Harry, Rawhide, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Ungorgiven, or a host of spaghetti westerns of the 1960s. Between them these two actors contributed to more than 240 films or TV shows (and some of those TV shows ran into hundreds of episodes), between 1950 and today. Marvin died in 1987 aged 63, while Eastwood continues to work at 94.

Given their tough guy images I have always found it odd to think that in 1969 the two of them appeared in the musical comedy film Paint Your Wagon. Even stranger for me is that fact that the song from the film "Wand'rin Star" where Marvin sings in this gravelly voice "...I was born under a wand'rin star...", should be a number 1 hit in the UK for three consecutive weeks in March 1970.

What has this to do with wargames, figure painting, making terrain or anything else I usually write about? Well nothing really. I just needed a title for this post and when I thought of Paint Your Wagon it sent me down one of those memory rabbit holes.

What this post is really about is to show this nice French Napoleonic supply wagon that I finished on Monday. I had been looking at this model on the Perry site for some time now and it has been added and removed from my orders half a dozen times. The hull is a nicely detailed resin casting that needed minimal cleaning.

It is fabulously over loaded with all kinds of clutter, trunks, chests, boxes, bags, blanket rolls and no doubt a fair amount of loot.  It comes with a removable cover.

There is a vivandiere and a rather grim faced driver seated at the front. 

This piece will feature at the centre of a game in the not too distant future.

A Régiment Légère

Following on from the line regiment that I posted last week, here is the matching légère regiment. 

Again there are three battalions, two in tunic and one mixed tunic and greatcoat.

All three battalions and their voltigeur companies deployed.

Couple of line artillery sets, one foot and one horse, are yet to be completed, but next on the painting table is a rather nice Napoleonic French wagon set.

French Line Infantry

Ahead of the recent price rise for the Perry plastics I bought three boxes of  line infantry to 'round out' my French Napoleonic army for the solo campaign I am planning for next year. For my 24 figures battalions each box, with an additional command frame, makes two battalions and eight skirmishing figures. 

These three boxes therefore makes six battalions, which added to two other spare battalions that I have makes two brigades - one small division.

Here is the first batch of three battalions - a line infantry regiment. I like the way that the battalions can be built with a mix of figures in tunic and greatcoat.

The First Battalion

The Second

The Third 

The regiment deployed with its voltigeurs to the fore

The second batch will be a three battalion light regiment and some guns will support them.