Twin Tanks

Now the Covid rules have changed for (almost) all of Scotland we are allowed to poke about inside each other's houses once more, and I've had the chance to inspect what Himself's been up to in his den.

A project I haven't featured on the blog for quite a while is a number of 3mm scale kits he's building for the Engineering Consultant.

This pair of ex-GWR 2-8-0 tanks are made from different kits (sorry, I can't remember what they are) and represent two varieties, the 42XX and the 5205 classes.

Swindon aficionados will be able to tell you all the differences, starting with the obvious one which is the outside, or not, steam pipes.

They do look really rather good and remind me again what an attractive size standard gauge 3mm scale models are.

Bags of Drewry

The previously mentioned aspiration to build a model of WHR diesel number 9 has taken a big leap forward with he arrival of some prototype etches.

We were offered the chance to buy them from the owner of RT Models who is working on bringing out a kit to run on the Farish 08 chassis. (What else?!)

Unless I am mistaken - which is always a possibility - these are in nickel silver, and I bought them knowing that at least one detail will need to be kit-bashed, because the etched vents in the side doors along the bonnet are in the wrong places.

This is more than outweighed, I hope, by the benefits of a crisp, solid and reasonably heavy body structure.

The other fun aspect is that it because it is a test etch it doesn't come with any instructions, so I'm sure Himself is going to thank me for that!

Petit Pots

I've had a second go at the lamp pots for the roof of the Pickering brake.

I reckon I've shortened them by around a 1mm and to my eye they look a bit better, although it's very tough to properly recreate the look of the real ones.

Why are carriage lamp pots the hardest thing to get right?

Covid Safe Carriage

Little Welsh railways have had lots of reasons to thank Victorian carriage designers in the last year, as compartment stock has become the solution to running Covid-safe services.

I suspect the walls between the seats was probably more to do with wanting to keep the riff-raff away  than concern for keeping out infectious diseases - although all the No Spitting signs on the old Glasgow trams show us that was also on their minds.

The more we learn about the current pandemic also gives us a greater appreciation of the excellent ventilation afforded by all those droplight windows on the more traditional carriage.

All of which will no doubt make the new replica Pickering brake carriage a very welcome addition to the Welsh Highland Heritage Railway fleet.

As you can see from the image above, I've started work on the interior for our model.

Already I can see that his fancy idea for disguising the vacuum pipe bend, which means the chassis has to be fitted with a twisting motion, is going to have to go.

Get the cutters out....

P - P - Pick Up A Pickering

A Sunday morning off - the first in ages - gave a chance to catch up with Himself for coffee in the garden and get instructions for what I'm to do with the interior of the WHHR Pickering brake replica.

I haven't decided whether to take the easy route and do the inside of the carriage first, or have another crack at the lamp pots.

So long as the Indian variant doesn't begin to run riot across the whole of Scotland we can, from today, socialise in each other's houses again, so we also spent some time working out the basics of a design for a fold-down layout in the spare room in my house to be built over the coming months.

Ostensibly this is so my youngest has somewhere more practicable to run his burgeoning 00 collection than the current layout-on-wheels which lives under his bed, but I've got a secret plan to make sure that it's a mixed gauge layout with some 9mm NG track on there as well.

Purely as a test track, you understand......

Pickering Pots

Apologies for the unusually long gap between posts on the blog, which I can attribute mostly to the inconvenience of the election, and its aftermath, here in Scotland, which has required a lot of overtime in my professional life.

Added to which, Himself has been occupied with projects which I am not going to publicise on this page.

So the upshot of all this is there's not been a lot to tell you about, expect that I managed to get the experimental lamp pots for the Pickering brake carriage passed to Himself, but I fear it's going to be back to the drawing board.

It's always hard to judge when the model is unpainted, but I think it's pretty clear the pieces are too big and I shall have to try and make some smaller ones - which is a real pain because these were very fiddly to make.

In my defence I would say that these items are always one of the hardest items to judge because you rarely see them in real life from the sort of angle that you view a model - from above.

Pots Of Joy?

As I mentioned in my previous blog post I have had a go at replicating the lamp pots from the replica Pickering brake, and with one master made from sections of styrene tube I have cast a set of four.

They look for all the world like very miniature chess pieces - narrow gauge pawns, perhaps?

I know that they don't completely match the real things in every detail, but they are a very complicated design, and there's a limit to what you can achieve with something that's only a few millimetres high - at least that's my excuse.

I'd like to think they're a passable representation, but the test will be when I can take them over to Himself, perch them on the carriage roof and compare to the photographs we have.