On Its Wheels

There's been a little bit of progress on 150 although it probably looks rather more significant that it is.

I've finished off the bogies by adding the bolster strip to bring them up to the correct height and added the Greenwich couplings.

This involves soldering them on which is always something of a hit or miss affair, and this time it was very much miss.

In fact what should have been a 5 minute job stretched to over an hour and involved some burned fingertips.

(There might also have been some bad language too were in not for the fact the children were within earshot.)

The difficulties were due to the unusually inward positioning of the front bogie which means the tongue on the bogie frame to which we can usually attach the shaft of the coupling was not long enough, so I had to try to solder on an extension.

I lost count of how many times I had to re-do it because the coupling and its enormously long shaft was not sitting straight, or the coupling head was too near or too far away from the end of the carriage, or the everything overheated and the previous joint fell apart as I was doing the next one.

I got there eventually, however, but it would not surprise me in the least if Himself takes one look at it and decides to do it again.

He'll do it better, of course.