Princess

There are two options here - either Himself is very bored with his self-imposed confinement already, or there’s a tricky task he’s trying to avoid!

Out of the blue last night there popped into my inbox news of a new project to make up an ancient white metal Small England as an unpowered, tow-around Princess.

Naturally I approve of this plan because I just love the England engines.

We already have a redundant old Ibertren chassis to mount it on.

The question, of course, is what livery to paint it in?

The current Victorian lined maroon in museum condition?

Or just liberated from the plinth in Blaenau condition with faded green and red frames?

For some reason I’m fascinated by tatty, Garrawegian brutalism, perhaps because it’s something I just have a vague memory of as a child?

The Old Ladies

Our old Blanche is back together and has had a little test run with her sister on the Bron Hebog fiddle yard.



She still needs her fly cranks painted red but it’s great to see the old girl in action again after 8 years inactivity.

Ladies Falsies

The final stage of rehabilitating our Blanche is to give the lady back her modesty with a set of outside frames.

In this case she's faking it, because the outside frames are just pieces of very thin, carefully-shaped, styrene which slip between the wheels and the those iconic red fly cranks.

The original ones have long since gone brittle and cracked so Himself has made up a new set.

The reason we went for plastic was to be sure that there could never be any issues with them shorting out against the frame or the wheels.

Blanche Rides Again!

I dropped hints at the weekend on the Bron Hebog social media feeds that things were about to happen with our old Blanche.

This is our original model, made from a Dundas white metal kit with an Ibertren chassis adapted with outside fly cranks, which failed quite spectacularly at an exhibition around 8 years ago.

It has been replaced in service by a Backwoods kit and has sat on a shelf for all that time since.

Rummaging around in his chassis bits box for gear wheels for the Garratt seems to have prompted Himself to take a look at getting it going again.

The thing which stopped the engine was the front 'clock side' fly crank falling off the axle, but the underlying fault was with a gear wheel which was going out of mesh and affecting the quartering,  putting the motion under strain with the inevitable result.

Putting it all right has been quite involved.

Himself has had to make up a new front axle and bearing, and change the gear wheel which drives it.

To do that he had to replace the stub axle the gear revolved on which has broken off in the old chassis - perhaps the root cause of the original failure?

He tells me that there is now noticeably less slop in the front axle and it doesn't disengage the drive gear.

That things are getting a little worn is no a surprise given than it put in 20 years hard service on Dduallt!

The cranks have been refitted and quartered, and the next job is to cut some new fake side frames from styrene as the old ones have gone brittle and are broken.

Oh Gear!

We're hopeful that there may have been a breakthrough which will enable us to complete our final NGG16 kit - not that there's actually a locomotive to model until the FR ever gets around to putting a collection of standard parts called 140 into service....

The issue is that we discovered one of the two Garratt kits we bought last year - the final two ever produced - were missing a vital set of gears for each bogie.

They are plastic gears with the outer ring having 20 teeth and the inner one with 10, and so far we've been unable to find anywhere that we can buy replacements.

However, the other day Himself was looking through his chassis bits box and discovered something that looked familiar.

It turns out they are gears from an old Ibertren 'Cuckoo' chassis, and it would appear that the only difference between them is in the centre which requires reaming out to accept the axles on the Garratt chassis.

He's going to make up a gearbox and see if his hunch is correct.

Whoever would have thought that the rough old Ibertren, the staple chassis of white metal 009 kits for so many years, would have anything in common with the ultimate expression of 4mm narrow gauge modelling, the Backwoods kits?

Finding Faults

Himself is plugging away at the snagging list prior to taking Bron Hebog to Bressingham for Narrow Gauge East this summer.

The problem is that in trying to sort one issue you discover others.

So it was when he set up one half of the fiddle yards to try and sort an electrical niggle on the 'cab control' wiring and found that a number of the indicator LEDs on the Rhyd Ddu end panel had failed.

So he's had to open all that up to replace them.

Quite why they've failed is a mystery.

The ones in the control panel on Dduallt have lasted for more than 20 years, but after just two years in the west of Scotland climate these have gone pop!

Is there a connection?

Anyway, I thought you might also like to see a snap of the loco he's been using for testing duties.

Our original Dundas Linda, which had major surgery to its Ibertren chassis to fit it with cranks and outside frames (and a heart transplant with a Mashima motor) is still going strong.

Primed Planet

Our replacement Conway Castle is coming on a treat and has been given a coat of primer ready for painting.

This one, you'll recall, is being built because our original engine - our very first OO9 model, in fact - sports the orange / black / grey so called 'Bertie Basset' livery of the 1980's and so is totally inappropriate to use on Bron Hebog to represent this workhorse of the WHR reconstruction and Dinas yard factotum.

There are also a few detail changes on the body such as the proper cab doors and the square cornered windows and some air filters which sprouted on the bonnet in the intervening years.

Conway Castle II is again built from a Chivers white metal kit running on an Ibertren chassis, but it has received an organ transplant in the shape of a Mashima motor donated from our original model of Blanche which was forced into retirement when its outside frame motion self-destructed at an exhibition with Dduallt a number of years ago.

The motor was still a good 'un though, and Himself tells me this 'Conk Out' runs very sweetly.