I noticed during the first of our St Ruth test days before Nottingham that we were having to do rather a lot more loco swapping and sharing between trains than I was comfortable with. This prompted me into a re-evaluation of my gloat box to see if I could scrape together some more motive power... pronto. The first thing to make it out was a Farish warship - Hermes. This was a really minimalist conversion - wheels turned down by the Association's wheel turning service (the warship has a smaller gear than most locos, so there are no drop-in wheels available) plus some DG couplings and away it went in time for our second test session, but that's not what this post is about.
The second 'new' loco involved rather more work - I had been taking a look at a Poole Western (Courier) that had been languishing since new. I had the wheels turned down for this years ago but had done nothing else to it. On putting it on the track I found that it was not running properly at all and the usual remedies weren't working, so my attention moved to another gloat box resident - a China made BachFar Western (Fusilier) that I picked up in a moment of rashness on eBay a couple of years ago. This had had literally nothing done to it but on transplanting Courier's wheels I found that it ran pretty happily so there was my starting point.
I could have just turned out Fusilier as a minimalist conversion, after all the BachFar product is a significant improvement in terms of the paint job over the early Poole offering, but somehow I just couldn't bring myself to accept the moulding lines, the cab windows sticking out past the roof and most of all the split front skirts to accommodate 'N' gauge curves.
Back in the dim and distant past I converted another Farish (Poole) Western to 2mm with some upgrades for the worst aspects of the Poole product. This is D1051 which you can see in the photos, chosen based on the nice double page portrait of 1051 at Laira in the Bradford Barton 'Westerns' book. I decided to upgrade Fusilier along the same lines, but using a second hand (green - yuck!) body as the basis so that I could keep Fusilier's body in reserve just in case I didn't finish in time.
To cut a long story short, the new loco was ready to roll on Thursday evening in time for the setup day at Nottingham. By then it had transfers but no actual identity because I needed to pick up name and number plates from Shawplan when I got to the show. After getting home that evening I still had to fit the engine room glazing and said name and number plates in time for Saturday morning.
The Farish interpretation of the class 52 is noticeably too long, but if that was going to be fixed... well... I wouldn't start from here. The changes involved cleaning up the moulding lines, replacing the glazing (including the engine room glazing that isn't glazing at all), lowering the body, correcting the middle skirts and cutting proper apertures for the various fillers plus handrails, lamp brackets, headcodes etc. Probably the biggest change is to the front skirts - new ones were fabricated from Plastikard with the 'T' shaped recess for the buffer beam and couplings that is such a feature of the front end... and that is the one thing that makes this upgrade a bit tricky...
The problem with fitting new skirts is that the ends of the bogie want to be in the same place. Shortening this end of the bogie is not a good option because the keeper retaining clips are right at the end. For 1051 I solved the problem by turning both bogies around. The other end of the bogie is shorter so this gives enough clearance behind the skirt. The motor magnet was also reversed to make the loco run in the expected direction. This was not an option with the Bachfar mechanism because the gear tower is offset towards the end of the loco. I noticed that the bogie pivot on the Bachfar chassis is moveable - there are several notches in the chassis block that give a choice of positions for the pivot. Turning the pivot around gives more options. The main snag is that if you move the pivot then the plastic driveshaft is too long so I made a new driveshaft from brass tube and brass rod and found to my surprise that the chassis still ran just as well with this installed. My modified chassis has bogie centres 3mm shorter than the original. This is spot on for the Western but there are plenty more dimensional issues, so it's a minor victory. It does mean that the front skirts are correctly proportioned from the side view, which is something that is not quite right on 1051.
The paint job involved spraying the fronts white and then yellow, followed by masking the warning panels and an overall coat of maroon. I used Precision maroon but added some Humbrol 153 red to lighten it a bit because I think that the Precision colour looks a bit too dark when compared with most photos. Transfers are resurrected Woodheads again.
The loco ran well at Nottingham... considering that it consists of bits of 4 different locos bodged together in a hurry. The wheels are a very mixed bunch because I'd already stolen four of Courier's axles for my class 25 and didn't want to take the 25 apart again just before a show. Some of them have also had split gears replaced and are a little bit wonky as a result and only two of them have the faces profiled as they should be. I might treat it to some new drop-in wheels as a reward, but then again I might just get its original wheels turned down and save the extra pennies for Mr Dapol. There are still some jobs left to do - like a cab interior to hide the rather prominent worm gears, the fillers that didn't get done in time and some brake rigging on the bogies, plus some fiddly painting to represent the window pillars. I'll also weather it, but not too much because I intend to represent the loco in a pretty clean condition.
Oh, the identity... I wanted a maroon loco with small warning panels to fit in with the mid 60s nominal date for St Ruth but I also wanted one that stayed in this scheme for a long time. My first choices were Western Lancer or Trooper and I emailed Shawplan to ask them if I could pick these plates up form them on the Friday evening. To their credit, they did indeed sort out the plates that I asked for... and then left them back at their base. We also both managed to leave behind my email with the list of choices but I remembered that third choice was Western Talisman which was still maroon in July 1969 and finally came to a nasty end in the Ealing accident in 1973. Shawplan had the Talisman plates on their stand, so the decision was made. I'm not sure if the maroon Talisman and the blue Ambassador could really have stood next to each other, but there is only a year between two dated photos that I have of them in those liveries, so maybe.
No doubt my efforts will be eclipsed soon my Mr Dapol, but his new release will be too late to have helped our motive power situation at Nottingham. I'm not sure if it's fate but I seem to have developed a nasty habit of building models that are the subject of releases by the main manufacturers - the sleeping cars and the Western were both done knowingly, but I also have an incomplete Mark 2 FK and you can probably just see a maroon CCT in one of the photos - both recently announced by Farish.
Some more pictures of Talisman and Ambassador lined up side by side on South Yard. I must dust that platform though.
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