Thursday 27 September 2018

Like London Buses

So the saying goes, you wait for one and then three turn up - and so it is with Garratt kits.

I'd spent many months wondering whether we were ever going to get our hands on any more Backwoods Miniatures NGG16s to complete our WHR fleet, and now another one has landed in our lap.


I posted a few weeks ago about how I managed to secure (at considerable cost) the last two kits produced, and then during our recent trip to  Dinas to show Bron Hebog one of the visitors told us that he too had an untouched NGG16, but had come to realise that he would never get round to building it, and would we be interested in taking it off his hands and giving it a good home?

As you can imagine, we didn't need to be asked twice - and we are tremendously grateful to this gentleman.

Himself is very excited by this because it is one of the original run of kits, the tell-tale signs being the smaller-sized box and - crucially - the provision of Mashima motors.


These motors are also out of production and the more recent kits came with alternatives which don't have the facility to be secured in place with screws, and the suggestion in the instructions is that you glue them in place.

Himself doesn't like this idea much.

So it's been decided that this will be the first of the kits to be built and turned into 143.

The others will become models of 130 - which is nearing the completion of its restoration - and 140 (if it ever gets done - which the FR General Manager insists WILL happen).

Having this third kit means we will no longer need to vandalise our original NGG16 - which as you can see in the picture at the top of the page has always run in ACR condition - to try to make it look like one of the Welsh machines.

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