Review Of The Year - Part 2

April

By this point my Bro Madog kit-bash had got to the point where the body had been assembled and was ready to be primed.

The main change to the carriage was creating the toplight windows by cutting out solid plastic and inserting new pillars and a top rail.

I was pleased that you really couldn't see the join.

Himself was tackling the biggest outstanding scenery job which was lining the walls of Cutting Mawr.

Some of it was done with genuine pieces of Welsh rock, although most were copies I'd cast in resin.

He also set about fitting a basic backscene to hide the goings-on in the fiddle yards from view.

May

I had started work on a second WHHR vehicle for a new rake, and again it involved a kit bash.

The ex-VoR brake van has changed a lot from the version with matchboard sides which is made by Dundas.

What I decided on was using the chassis and the very bottom section of the body (showing the frames) and making the rest out of styrene.

It was coming along well.

Himself had done a quite remarkable job with the gold leaf lining on a second vintage carriage - this time number 15.

And I was busy starting work on yet along superbarn, this time casting the parts for what would become 120.

June

This was a very big month for us as we took Bron Hebog out on the road for the first time in a couple of years - and what a road trip it was, all the way to Norfolk for a one day show!

The Dad's Army section of the museum building is certainly up there as one of the more unusual venues we've exhibited at, but they looked after us very well indeed all weekend.

It'd got the WHHR brake van ready to the point where it had been painted in BR blue, just like the real one, to wind everyone up.

Unfortunately I had yet to get my hands on some of the famous double arrow transfers to complete the look.

We'd had a few issues with track alignments during the show. It was nothing major but it's still and irritation when you're exhibiting, so Himself decided to invest in some additional  measures after we'd returned home.

These precision engineering dowels don't come cheap, but hopefully it will be money well spent.

Review Of The Year - Part 1

I've established a tradition on this blog in the last days of December of taking stock of everything that Himself and I have achieved over the year.

I usually find there are things that I've forgotten about, and I'm always surprised by how much we've got done.

So here's a look back at what we were up to in the first quarter of 2018.

January

Looking back now I see that there was a lot of carriage building going on at this time.

FR 'superbarn' 118, which I'd built up from resin castings, had been painted, assembled, had its transfers applied and, finally, varnished.

Himself was also starting work on a very long-term project indeed - the completion of a Worsley Works bowsider 19 which had been sitting in a drawer in its naked state for years.

I was also busy trying to keep up with the expanding WHR carriage fleet and had started work on saloon 2047 which was being scratch built in styrene - as opposed to the resin parts I use for the latest FR stock.

February

This was the big reveal of our finished Robex 3D printed Lilla.

I thought at the time - and still do - that it looks absolutely stunning!

We'd decided to finish it in its current, highly ornate, plum livery with oodles of gold leaf lining.

It was taking up all Himself's reserves of patience and concentration but it was already clear the results were going to be worth it.

He'd also restarted work to plug the last remining scenic gap on the layout, landscaping around the last two houses I'd built.

March

There was yet more carriage work going on with me kit-bashing a Dundas 'Bro Madog' carriage to make it look like it's current condition on the WHHR.

As to why I was doing it, that was about to be revealed...

I'd also been putting together the castings for the second of the latest FR observation carrs 152 ready for Himself to add a brass roof and the window pillars at the front.

The reason I was making a WHHR carriage became clear when I handed over Himself's birthday present - a Robex print for the Bagnall Gelert.

I had confidence that he'd make a fine job of the body, after what he'd done with Lilla

The challenge for him was going to be doing the outside frame adaptation on a Fleischman chassis to go under it.

I had a feeling he wasn't going to thank me for that...

You Can't See The Join

Now it's had a coat of primer on it I can asses how good a job I made of the conversion of WHHR carriage number 7, chopping off the top of the sides of the Dundas kit and adding the row of windows.

If I say so myself you wouldn't be able to tell that it wasn't meant to be like that.

Himself is also planning to add a few finer details, like slicing off the moulded handrails and door handles to replace them with brass ones - you can just make out the holes he has drilled to accept them.

He's also replaced the plastic air brake pipes which come with the kit and has made up his own from wire.

On with the painting now.

Bogie Bearings

The first of our WHHR carriages is on wheels now.

While the plastic used for the injection moulding in the Dundas kit is nice and soft for cutting and altering when I was kit-bashing the body, these days they're now using it for the bogies as well.

This means that it's a very necessary precaution to drill out the axle boxes from the inside and fit some brass cup bearings.

With Bron Hebog being a very long layout by 009 standards the chances are that left in their original state the pin points on the wheel axles would very quickly bore out the locating holes in the bogie

frames leading first to loose wheels, and then eventually, no wheels.

This was certainly our experience with Dduallt so we're taking no chances with the even longer run.

You can see in the picture that he has also soldered an extension to the Greenwich coupling so it can be glued into position on the bogie.

Next it's onto painting the carriage in a mix of green and brown shades which is never going to end well for Himself, alas....

Adaptations

Altering the Dundas WHR carriage to make the flood removable, as we do with most of our other carriages, has meant a lot of changes on the inside too.

On the kit the seats are supposed to be fixed to the insides resting on these moulded ledges.

Not only are the ledges not required if the seats are going to be free-standing, they will also prevent us slipping in the glazing, so they'll have to be removed.

Fortunately this kind of plastic is very soft and it's easily done with the scalpel.

Next, the seats need to have new ends made to support them where they would have been fixed to the inside.

All these seats, once they've been made up, are fixed in place on the floor, which has also had its footsteps glued in place.

Here you can see it in place inside the body.

The roof has not been fixed in place yet and is just resting in position for now.

It's been handed over to Himself to get on with painting it at his leisure.

Breaking The Rules

I am one of life's rule-followers.

If there's a queue, I'll stand it in. If there's a notice, I'll obey it.

All of which makes me a little uneasy about casting aside the instructions for putting together the Dundas kit for the WHHR Bro Madog carriage, but I think I'm doing it for the right reasons.

Many years ago when scratch building our carriages we realised that it made more sense to have the roof fixed in place and leave the floor removable.

On most plastic kits, though, just like this one, you are advised to build the body shell by fixing the side end pieces onto the floor and leave gluing on the roof until last.

The problem with this is what you do when it comes to glazing and varnishing the carriage?

If you fit the glazing and then glue the roof on, making a sealed box, when you come to give it a protective coat of varnish you end up spraying (and ruining) the glazing.

If you don't fix the roof down, so enabling you to spray it without the glazing in there, then you have to run the gauntlet of using solvent to secure the roof later and any runs, spills or drips could ruin all your hard work.

Keeping the floor / chassis removable until the very last minute solves these problems, which is why we do it that way.

So although it looks like I've built the carriage conventionally in the picture above, the floor is, in fact, removable.

Have A Bash

In idle moments between casting another batch of SAR wagons for Narrow Planet I have been having a go at adapting the Dundas kit for the WHR Bro Madog coach to represent it more like it's current form.

(I say current because, just like Boston Lodge across the Traeth, Gelert's Farm is always fiddling with things and the entrance doors have been altered again with a double opening to give better access.)

There has been a large degree of trial and error in the process so far.

I had hoped that I would be able to leave a very thin bar of the original plastic along the top of the windows but it proved to be too flimsy so I ended up chopping it off all along and fixing a new strip along the top of the opening windows to form the toplights.

At the far end, as you can see above, I was able to leave the pillars full height and just put to horizontal strips in to form the new window.

Once I've got the second side done I can start making up the kit as per the instructions.

Yo Bro!

Last weekend at Model Rail Scotland I finally got around to doing something I'd been meaning to do for years, to replace one of my very first 009 models from nearly 30 years ago.

It was the Dundas plastic kit for the WHHR's 'Bro Madog Eisteddfod' carriage which was built at Gelert's Farm in the late '80s.

It may strike those you know me as an FR carriage anorak as strange but at the time I really didn't know my Bug Boxes from my Barns and I recall thinking that what I'd bought was a model of the iconic observation cars 100 and 101.

I think it was probably the 3 end windows which made me think that.

(To be fair on myself, I also remember asking the trader who was selling the kits whether it was a model of an FR carriage and he didn't demur.)

I thought that perhaps I could pull the wool over some eyes by painting it in then new FR 'Mountain Prince' livery - and it looks very good, I reckon - but ultimately I was just fooling myself.

In consequence we've never really run the carriage much at all.

That could be about to change, though,

When we take delivery of our Bachmann Baldwin tank we'll need something for it to haul around, and a number of years ago when the survivor 778 visited the WHHR this was one of the carriages it was running with.

(We'll just pretend it went all the way to Beddgelert.)

The issue is that the carriage was rebuilt with toplights added in - to make it look even more like an FR Barn! - but it would be hard to alter the existing carriage and painting over it with green would probably fill in the matchboard detail.

So what I've decided to do is buy another kit and adapt it while it's still a flatpack.

I'll probably also get some brass Worsley kits for the vintage bogie carriages to go with it in due course.