Scratchbuilt Carriage Kit

After many hours making the sub-assemblies the carriage body comes together quite quickly.

These pictures take you through today's session on Service Carr 2011.

The last 'parts' to be completed were the two end pieces which required the second layer of detailing strip to be put on and the corridor connections fixed into place. One of the more fiddly jobs is the electrical connector and cable. The vacuum hose will be one of the last pieces to go on before the carriage is painted because they can be easily knocked off.

Here, then, are the sides and ends laid out...



The inset door assembly has been fixed to back of the main carriage bodyside and bonded to one of the ends..



My floors and roofs sit within the bodyside to stop it bending inwards at the middle. The floor is the bottom of the two pieces here, with the cutaways for the vestibule clearly seen, and the false, flat bottom of the roof above...



Here is the 'box' put together with the false roof in place, it's finally looking like a carriage now...



And with the roof skin in place..

4 Door Saloon

That's all four doors completed for the WHR Service Carr 2011, and the next stage is to mount them behind the central section of the saloon, detail-up the ends, and fix it all together into a box shape.

I mentioned before that these door sub-assemblies are very complex models in their own right.

I had a quick count up and each one is made up of 28 separate pieces of styrene which have to be cut to size and glued in position. No wonder it takes about an hour to assemble each one.

In this pic you can see two of them turned over showing how the window droplight detail and the inset steps beneath the door are formed.



Oh, and in case you were desperate to know the exact shade of paint used on the Romanian ballast wagon (see the previous post) Himself has now reminded me it is Railmatch EWS maroon.

Wagon Update

I pondered long and hard about a suitably awful pun to title this post but I think I have been defeated this time. Apologies for that.

Anyhow, here's a picture which is pretty self-explanatory.



As you can see Himself has given the Romanian ballast wagon a blast of top coat red.

On this model it was a close call as to whether it was a red wagon with lots of black bits, or a black wagon with red bits. Self-evidently we have decided on the former and the black will now be picked out by hand.

With red not being one of his better colours he asked me to select the shade of paint. I'd like to tell you what it was, but I can't; I've forgotten.

Apologies, once again...

The Doors

Tonight I'd thought I'd show you what's involved in making up the doors / vestibules for the WHR carriages.

These are made up as a sub-assembly to be fixed to the back of the main part of the carriage side.

In this view you can see one which is still at the first stage and another which has got 2/3rds of the second layer of detail added.



In effect it is like making a mini-bodyside.

When adding the second layer I start with the vertical L shape piece which acts as the spacer for the inset vestibule.

On either side of the door are thick pillars and then the door itself is represented with some very fine strips above and below the window.

As the WHR carriages get a mid-life overhaul at Boston Lodge they are adding wood framed window droplights, and these are made up on the model with a third layer of detail at the back.

These door assemblies are also handed. The ones you see here are for the left hand side.

Lumps & Bumps

Down south there has been some progress with the Blanche II project.

Having tried out Archers resin transfer rivets on some 7mm ballast wagons I made for a Boston Largs Works client I suggested them to Himself as a solution to the problem of the miss-matched rivets on the Backwoods Blanche cab and the Dundas tender cab.

The results are very pleasing...



As you can see, Blanche has had her first encounter with the airbrush, and is now sporting a base coat of green.

The big brass bump on the saddle tank is the first draft for her new dome which was offered up for size before the final version goes into production.

MOTW - The Square

Our model this week is one of Himself's masterpieces, the 1970's 'Super Fairlie' Earl of Merioneth.



The basis of this model is a Backwoods Miniatures Double Fairlie kit for the classic late-Victorian Fairlie, which provides the double bogie chassis and the main frame for the superstructure.

But the most visible part of the locomotive - the iconic angular square body - is Himself's work; scratchbuilt in brass.

The D shape smokeboxes are whitemetal castings from the kit for Linda / Blanche kindly provided by Parkside Dundas.

Being born in the 70's myself I have a very soft for the Earl, or 'The Square' as it is more commonly known around the railway.

It was built at a time when the railway's sole focus was on carrying as many passengers as possible, in as fewer trains as possible, to Blaenau and so the massive tanks - which put the locomotive over the weight limit when full - were designed to hold enough water for a round trip and sufficient fuel oil for the whole day.

The loco's makeovers in the late 80's, and again in the 90's, were remarkable for the way they transformed the look of the machine with very few changes to the superstructure and should perhaps be required reading for design students.



Aside from the bling brass domes - not shown in the picture above, which formerly adorned Merddin Emrys during its own aesthetic nightmare in the 70's / 80's - and the new round smokeboxes, the changes were purely cosmetic and achieved with a paintbrush.

To this day I struggle to believe those are still the same tanks and cab the locomotive first appeared with in 1979, but they are. It is an optical illusion caused by the lining and moving the position of the nameplates to the centre of the tanks.

Service Entrance

I've got a few more bits to show you on the WHR Service Carr project.

Because the 'standard' WHR carriage design has recessed vestibules my scratchbuilt carriages are much more of a composite affair than a normal box of two sides and two ends.

After constructing the two main sides of the passenger saloon I make four doors which will be fixed on to the rear - with a 60 thou strip acting as a spacer - at each end.

It's a little hard to describe so I shall post pictures here on the blog at each stage.

Below you can see the basic outline of the four doors. The pillars are a little wider on one side, this is the overlap where it is glued to the back of the main bodyside.



Also in the picture are the first stages of the carriage ends. On these you can see quite clearly how the carriage body is narrower at each end. The very top - the curved profile - is the full width of the carriage.

Below are the two sides which are just about finished now. It's a shame I can't have 3D pictures on the blog so you'll have to take my word for it that the louvre doors look a lot more convincing on the actual model than they do in these snaps.