Picking up on our look back at the year, and a lot of what we were up to in the spring revolved around the carriage fleet.
April
A long-term ambition had been to get round to buying and assembling a Chris Veitch brass kit for the FR 'sentry' brake van, which makes a very distinctive model full of Victorian character.
Trying our best to keep up with the carriage works in Wales we also set making a miniature version of the Welsh Highland Heritage Railway's new Pickering brake replica.
This project had a false start because, at first, I purchased the Dundas brass kit.
Once Himself put the body together he found there were a few inaccuracies in the dimensions, but more importantly from our point of view, the design made it difficult to paint and to fit an interior.
So we put that one on ice and got hold of the alternative body kit from Worsley Works.
If you read the first part of the Review you'll have seen a picture of the early stages of my commission to scratch build a model of Carnforth buffet car 114.
This was a snap I took just before it was sent off to its new home.
May
A crucial part of the Pickering project was to find a way to depict the fake lamp pots on the roof.
I had a number of goes at scratch building one which could be copied with resin casting.
Himself got round to finishing off the paint job on the 3mm scale ex-GWR 2-8-0 tank engines he'd been building for the Engineering Consultant.
It was just as well we kept in his good books, unknown to anyone, he was about to become a very important person in the top left hand corner of Wales.
In this month I also resolved that the time had come to make a model of the WHR's diesel shunter at Dinas.
The post about my intentions resulted in an offer to try out one of the prototype body kits from RT Models....
June
The paint job on the Pickering brake was one of the more straightforward ones so we didn't have long to wait for a picture of it posed ready for service on Bron Hebog.
With the Pickering built it left the Hudson toast rack carriage as one of the obvious missing vehicles from our WHHR sets.
We managed to get hold of one of the 009 Society kits before they sold out, but I was also keen to have a second model of the FR replica 39 in its current green livery, so the only option left was to scratch build.
This was a fortunate move because it transpired that Winson Engineering wasn't capable of making an exact copy of the original carriage, and there are some fundamental differences between the 1990s version and the original carriages.
My plan was to make a master for the carriage sides in styrene and cast a copy of it - the one in the picture shows me starting to embellish it with extra details in brass and styrene.
And June was also the month when, after much planning, we began installing the baseboard for a permanent dual gauge test track, my first home layout since I was a teenager.
We came up with an 8ft x 5ft board which can be folded into a frame on the wall when the space in the study is required for something more boring, such as *spoiler alert* self-isolating from Covid-19.....
