One of the last passenger projects needed for Wheal Imogen is a Class 158 in Regional Railways livery, working a Wales and West Alphaline service from Bristol to Newquay. I have a lot of Class 158 parts, I was in the process of building a Wessex Trains 3 car and 2 car in picture livery which are in bits with silver sides, I also had a P4 Wessex 158 which is now sold freeing up a set of Ultrascales. All not a lot of use for anything I am working on, so the intention was to respray one of the shells back into Regional Railways.

So last week after spotting a Regional Railways set as spares and repair on ebay I jumped at it. While it was missing its lighting units, a couple of bogie frames, and has some holes in the ends for the lights. I think this was actually started by another Rmweb member (back on the old version of the forum), if not it is very similar...

The idea is to cut out a piece of clear plastic, profile to shape and then glue into the holes that have been previously opened up below the handrails on the fronts. An etched WIPAC light cluster (using my own etch painted black) will then be glued into place behind it, followed by the lighting unit.



​The end with a WIPAC temporarily fitted in place

On the lighting unit I chopped off the ends of the LEDs to get a flat surface, one LED has been bent outwards in order to light up the marker light, while the night time running lights will be covered over with a piece of scrap etch painted grey. The logic being that I will not be running at night, so what’s the point of extra expense making it work…

The next piece of work was to get the wheels fitted, fortunately being Ultrascales they just drop in (and I already had a full set of frames that I had removed 1mm or so of material from.)

Still to go:
Repeat process for the powered coach
Glue in the new lights
Rewire the unit (as I want everything powered off a single decoder)
Commission some Alphaline logos and renumber
Fit Kaydee couplings between the two units, plus
New exhausts (with the missing lower section)
See if the new working end couplings Bachmann are fitting to the new 158/150 are available as spares and retrofit.