Elf baggage train WIP part 1

Matthew Sullivan from the Oldenhammer in Toronto -blog has created a nice baggage train for his wood elf army and written about both it and baggage trains in 3rd edition WFB in general. As Matthew points out baggage trains add realism, conflict and creative modeling to any 3rd edition army. I am not going to repeat his words here so just visit Matthew´s blog for further details.

I did some research of my own and found out that there aren´t many high elf baggage trains around. Actually I could not found one example of a painted high elf baggage train. And even from the collecting citadel miniatures site the picture for limited release pack is missing. 

At the Oldhammer forum I was able to find this thread about baggage trains where the original poster was thinking about getting one for his high elf army but it does not say if he ever completed it. But the thread itself gave me some ideas on how to proceed with my army.

The 3rd edition rulebook tells us that:"Baggage is represented by 1 wagon and 5 civilian models for every 1000 points in the army". For a normal 2000 point force I would therefore need 10 civilians and 2 wagons.

As there are not many elf civilian minis available I did order the TurnKey Miniatures´ set of elf villagers to make up for camp-followers. I also have a couple of resin tents and I will be adding some pack horses or ponies from Foundry´s excellent Baggage animals and livestock range. The tents are just fluff to add realism to army but I still need a couple of carts or wagons.

Elf villagers

So with 7 civilian minis and 4 tents at the moment I´m thinking about getting myself 3 pack animals and 2 carts or wagons. I don´t want to use duplicare models for civilians so the pack animals will propably take 3 civilians "slots". Ebay will hopefully help me with wagons. Tents and perhaps some other stuff that could be found at a camp will be added at some stage. I´m thinking about barrels, grain sacks, hay bales and so on.

Some tents

A beginning of a baggage train/army camp?

Please comment if you have suggestions on how to proceed with this project. Or if you know a good wagon model for nice price.