@ "J",
As it is an orangey- yellow plastic, I went with a 50-50 mix of Model Master RLM 66, and Panzer Gray '39 - 43. As a rule, I do not preshade, and since this is a rialroad based weapon, I will be keeping most dust effects very low. The front and rear bogies will get a very faint wear on the wooden plank surfaces with MM wood. I must be very light on all of this, as it is 1/72nd scale, and what goes as normal weathering in 1/ 35th, would be garish in 72nd.

How to tie it down. Drilled holes to align with the center axles on each bogie. I will loop twist ties over the axles, and down through the rail bed.

Nice one! They certainly don't make artillery pieces like that anymore.

Not since the advent of long range missiles.

Major assembly done. Painting some generic soldiers to place on it for scale.

Carl, what a massive model, and a even more massive effort to complete the build. Congrats on a outstanding effort.

I tried to watch a few of the videos full screen, and unfortunately for me the quality wasn't very good. Your stills were sharp and crystal clear, so following your build sequence was easy and a pleasure. Great build to follow.

I don't know much about that railway gun, but since it requires a pair of tracks to be moved and operated on, what happened when it was a single rail line, as not all tracks were paired in the real world. At least not here in the states.

Here in the UK, whenever the Queen goes anywhere there's always a couple of guys 10 yards in front of her with paint rollers, frantically giving all the walls a fresh coat so that they'll be all nice and pristine when Her Maj walks past.

That's why the Queen thinks that the whole world smells of paint.

And it was a bit like that with the Dora: Wherever the Germans took it, there were guys up ahead busily laying down the requisite tracks for it to lumber along shortly afterwards.

Hope that helps.

- Steve

PS: I'm not joking.

Steve, darn close.
They would survey, and spend close to a month to set up the curved parallel tracks for the aiming. The actual gun and support were all brought to the site, by an ordinary train. The sections to build the "double wide" wetre done very close to the firing area.

Hi, I just got one of these to play with.
I have made a start on the base dio for it. Pictures on the start of the rear wall of the cuttting the Germans made for it in my gallery.
I spent a couple of weeks of many many many hours googling and following links as references to the Gustav (nicknamed Dora) can be hard to easily find. This is the one that i think nails it but hey we all have an opinion!
http://samilitaryhistory.org/vol124lw.html
I found the info to be pretty much spot on with it tieing in the properly documented history with a lot of other bits and bobs when all put together like that linked site has seem to make coherent sense. Hope it might be of use to someone.

Great job on this very cool model!