Getting It Straight

When we set out to make Minffordd it was with the intention to make as much use of ready-to-run rolling stock as we could.

That may seen an odd approach for a layout team best known for amassing a huge collection of kit built and scratch built stock but we wanted to get it made as quickly as we could.

Wanting to have DCC sound on the layout was the other major consideration - so much easier with RTR!

However, there were still some locos which required some serious hacking about to be correct for our era, and one of them was Prince.

The era we are modelling Prince in the 1960s is the period where 'The Old Gent' was going through something of a mid-life crisis.

He hadn't yet started bulking up on the steroids - that came in the 1980s - but to try to keep up with the younger Ladies who appeared on the railway the decision was made to strengthen his frames and take out the classic step up beneath the saddle tank.

This look, which lasted for less than a decade, wasn't included in the 'tooling suite' for the Peco / Kato Small England so it was necessary for us to take the knife to it.

The good news is that the body breaks down into sub-assemblies, and the frame is one of these.

It was a relatively simple job to chop out the stepped-up section and join the two halves back together with some thin brass strip and fix the saddle tank section back on top.

To be completely authentic we also filed away the ballast weights in front of the smokebox and the resulting hole was disguised with some brass shim.

As the loco had to be completely disassembled in any case to hard wire in a DCC chip it didn't mean that much extra work.

Prince has come to be perhaps our most essential locomotive for operating Minffordd Yard because - on account of his traction tyres (I might have been wrong about those....)-  he's the only loco which can haul a full rake of wagons up to the Mineral Line,  all the rest have to drag them up a couple at a time and assemble the rake in the siding at the top.