B Wagon With Extra Brass Bits

I managed to sneak away to the modelling bench for a few minutes during the festive season to put the finishing touches to the first of my resin B wagons.

This involved drilling out the small holes marked in the casting along the frame and creating the grab rails out of 0.5mm brass.

There's quite a lot of them - 14 in all.

The final touches are the hexagonal hand brake wheels - the B wagons on the WHR have retained them at both ends, it seems, unlike the DZ's - and the door stops that hang down in the middle from the frame.

These are not the delicate castings that you'll find on my DZ kits but instead is a bent strip of metal bolted on to the frame. (A lot of the DZ's had this type of stop too). I created mine by the simple expedient of snipping a bit of the waste brass from the brake gear fret, bending them in the jaws of my pliers and super-gluing them on.

That's pretty much all I can do on the B wagon project for now until the test etches for the Bettendorf bogies arrive.