Peckett Progress

Himself has been fired with enthusiasm following the show at Dinas, so he says, so I'm not surprised that he has wasted no time in cracking on with the RT Models Harrogate Peckett kit.

He's started with the chassis. You get a considerable head start with this kit because it uses the latest Farish 08 chassis which comes with outside frames, or to me more accurate, a handy set of cranks already on the end of the axles.

Onto these you attach new coupling rods from a fret supplied with the kit before making up the cylinders, slide bars and fitting the connecting rods.

This chassis then fits up into the base of the locomotive which, as you can see below, includes new false frames in brass.

The kit is a mix of whitemetal and brass and Himself reports that is it not necessarily the easiest to put together, although he admits he is complicating matters by soldering the kit together as opposed to gluing it as the manufacturer recommends in the instructions.

This entails quite a lot of messing about adjusting the temperature of the iron.

This next pic shows it with the saddle tank casting in place.

From this angle you can see how much overhang there is in the 0-6-0 design and perhaps understand why there was such concern when the loco first arrived on the FR about the damage it might cause to the track which was most certainly not in the best of condition back in the late 1950's.