First Wash

A couple of days ago I showed you a picture of the new Observation Car 150 being primed, now Himself has made rapid progress on painting it.

I'm particularly pleased by how well the interior has come up with wood frames and the blue fabric well represented on those very distinctive armchairs in the main saloon.

The body has also had a first coat of its main colour - is it called Royal Purple?

The inside is more complicated than the average carriage with two-tone colour on the ceiling.

I think it's going to look pretty special when it's done.

The only downside is that they're already building the framework of a second one so well have to go through this all again.

Properly Parallel?

It was the moment of truth for carriage 125 the other day.

Having completed the ends with my best guesstimate of their respective widths there was no reason to delay gluing it together and see whether I ended up with parallel carriage body or not.

I'm relieved to say it looks like I have, and I'm rather pleased with how it's come together.

The cast resin vestibule end fixed on without difficulty to the styrene body sides.

More importantly I think, at this stage, it's definitely got the look of the prototype, wouldn't you agree?

Cornering

The process of fitting the our new full-sized FR bogies to the Superbarn fleet is complete so a test run was in order.

You may remember that I've blogged previously about how we had to make some alternations to the under frames on the carriages to increase the bogie swing so they could negotiate the tighter curves on Dduallt.

They were tested being pulled and propelled around the spiral so it looks like they are fit for traffic again.

Split Ends

The carriage ends are normally quite simple but 125 requires a bit more brainpower because they are not identical.

The trickiest aspect is accounting for the difference in their width.

The problem is that one end of the carriage has the vestibule doors inset as on a regular Superbarn saloon while the other is at the full width of the body.

I've had to make some calculations (and cross my fingers) to hopefully ensure that when it is all joined together the two body sides will be running parallel and it's not narrower at one end than the other.

At the point where my brain started to hurt I decided to stop theorising and just cut some styrene and see what happens....

Operation Observation Undercoat

If building 150 from scratch was a daunting prospect then so must painting it - more accurately lining it out afterwards.

So I'm impressed that Himself has grasped the nettle and started the process by giving it a coat of primer.

Before this there were a few little jobs to finish off like fitting the gutter down pipes at the back and the train vacuum pipe along the length of the underframe.

The vac pipe on the very front won't be fixed into position until the painting and lining is complete.

Two More For The Fleet

The two most recently-built B wagons have been varnished and are ready for service.

Quite honestly I've begun to lose count of how many of these we have now - and the real F&WHR for that matter, too.

I think we're quite well off for this later design, which I can knock out quite easily in resin, but I suspect we have not yet got a full compliment of the other type which are built from a Worsley Works scratch-aid kit.

Rather that take a boring picture on the work bench I thought I would pose them on the section of the layout which is up in the garage at the moment for the fence post installation.

The difficulty was that - like the real location - there is a fierce gradient around our S bend and I had to resort to placing a discreet blob of Blu Tac on one of the rails as a makeshift stop block to prevent them free-wheeling into oblivion while I took the snap.

Middle Door

So, I plucked up the courage to slice the other side of 125 almost in two, except for a sliver of a cantrail along the top.

I won't pretend it went like clockwork.

As soon as I had removed the section of lower bodyside I decided that the gap didn't look quite big enough and I set about relocating the window pillar on the right, which was not as simple as it sounds because by this point it already had all the beading in place.

That had to be carefully peeled off before chopping out the pillar and moving it a mm or so along the way.

Satisfied, at last, with the positioning I built up a section behind and formed a doorway.

Here's how the finished side looks from the front.

And from the back you can see how far into the carriage body this doorway is set.

I shall turn my attention to the ends next, which are not identical.

For the Caernarfon end I can use a set of standard double door superbarn castings but the other, which is a regular, full-width affair, will be scratch built in styrene.