Just a bit of a difference
I'm about halfway through lining her out. It has to be done in stages over several days because there's just so much of it. Also I can only do so much of it in one go before I lose grip of my sanity.
Some of you may recall a few years ago that I mentioned I had bought a couple of locomotives via an auction website; as I remember in the course of maybe an hour I secured for myself a K's 'Sir Sam Fay', a Nu-Cast N5 and a scratchbuilt C13.
Well since then I have of course rebuilt the 'Sam Fay', the N5 has been deemed perfectly acceptable, and the C13 until now has sat in a box waiting for me to decide what to do with it. Things moved forward a little late last year when I ordered some num
I left off last time with the basic bodyshell more or less finished, but no glazing, no roof as such and no interior.
The first thing I did was to build the interior; I again made use of the article in 'World of Trains' from 1991/92 to fabricate one from 0.5mm plastic sheet.
I re-used the glazing strips supplied by Hornby; but I cut these up into smaller pieces and fixed them in place with 'glue 'n' glaze', which dries clear. Once it had dried, I spent quite some time trying to clean
So; to recap; this started life as a Hornby clerestory carriage...
I dismantled it, cut the ends off, fitted new gangwayed carriage ends, cut the clerestory off the roof and made good the resulting hole with plastic sheet and model filler. I removed some small areas of the beading and down one side cut away the window mullions too. New beading was then fitted where necessary using pieces of 0.5 x 0.5mm plastic strip (I must order some more of this).
Now for the progress since!
I
Immediately after completing my Parker all-first, I bought a portrait cutter, and my first efforts using it fairly knock the plasticard hackbashes into fits.
More recently I bought a set of four Hornby clerestories with the intention of a simple repaint job, but a chance posting on Niles' freelance workbench by Skinnylinny showing cutting out the small compartment windows for a series of larger picture ones got me thinking.
The upshot is that I am fairly confident, having compared the
So with the bodywork built up to roof level, the obvious thing to do was to build an interior. Which the kit doesn't have. So I dug out a copy of 'The World of Trains' from 1992 which included general dimensions and specs for building a carriage interior, and fabricated mine from 0.5mm plastic sheet.
Very rough and ready, but then again the windows are rather small, the carriage isn't lit, and in those conditions you really can't see much of it and whilst you could go for a finely-de
I did a little more work on the B5 (after declaring it finished).
The tender; fitted a buckeye coupler and plated over the coal rails. The locomotive; added the reversing lever and picked out the smokebox door dart and hinges in silver.
Then I directed my energies toward the Ratio kits.
The first one I am looking at is an all-first. Most of the work involved consists of changing the bogies. I discarded the ones provided with the kit and settled on Coopercraft 8' Gres
Finished; already. Well, the first day or two of work on the model did complete the lion's share of the work necessary.
There will, maybe, be better photographs taken later, but this from the cameraphone really gives an idea of the completed model.
That steampipe to the smokebox had to go; this is a wet 'un. Four-column Ramsbottom valves came out of my spares box. All that really had to be done then was to re-instate the black paintwork and line her out, and as usual I've used a
There is something quite pleasing to my eye about the Robinson 4-6-0s. In fact I think the day I decided I had to model the GCR was the day I found a photograph of GCR Class 1 Sir Sam Fay in a volume of locomotive portraits, and for the last few years I have attempted to model various of the classes in differing mediums with differing success; recently many of my earlier hackbash efforts centred around Triang B12s have been scrapped as I find older whitemetal kits on Ebay.
One of those kit
I don't usually go in for large photography sessions, but a friend recently asked if I'd take a few of 'complete' trains of mine, rather than ones of the individual stock as and when I complete it.
So I thought, as it is the bank holiday and I have the time to do it, to oblige him.
As an initial set-up I decided on a coal train. Millholme Models Q4 0-8-0 (awaiting its turn in the paintshops for GCR livery), a short rake of Cambrian Kits pre-1923 private owner wagons wit
For a given value of finished, this one is finished. I may, at some future point, come back and rebuild the interior.
And in the background is the next project- the last (for the moment) of the large post-1910 mainline carriages.
I notice that my free storage allowance on Photobucket is somewhere around 70-75% used and therefore I am planning to delete a lot of my older photographs next weekend in order to free up storage space. I would therefore advise that if anybody wants copies of my photos, particularly the older ones up to around the beginning of 2015, that they download them in the next week before they are deleted.
So I then went on to finish the window and door mullions, and the fitted ventilators over them.
This is the corridor side.
And the kitchen side, which is something of an educated best guess as the drawings I am working off show only the corridor side and the carriage plan!- the saloon windows are easy enough and luckily I was able to find a few photographs of GCR restaurant cars to serve as pointers for the window arrangement to the kitchen.
Then it was time for some pai
A few years ago I set out to build a couple of rakes of lookalike GCR mainline stock circa 1920, one of five converted from Mainline/ Bachmann LMS carriages and the other of four from Graham Farish generic types. At the same time I bought another ex-LMS carriage for eventual conversion to a restaurant car, but as this involved a lot more surgery I put it up for a while and got on with some locos instead.
A few weeks ago I dug it out and work was able to start in earnest. The first stage wa
Finished?
Well, practically.
There are a few bits that need final finishing off; it still needs couplings, for example. And I think some extra plumbing and maybe some lining and nameplates would not go amiss. I'm surprised how much of a difference simply fitting the etched brass spectacle surrounds has made. Just sets the spectacle plate off nicely. I still have to varnish the model, thinking about it, and that will do wonders for flatting down the gloss finish
So I've now added the springs, a representation of the reversing lever and the sandboxes, and some Bill Bedford handrail jigs turned up, so the saddletank handrails have een added. Oh, some coal has been put in the bunkers too.
So as you can see, since last time I have added the boiler fittings, a nice dark blue paint job, and fitted a spectacle plate (which still needs the brass spectacle rims fitting, as well as painting to be finished off). It is getting there; but increasingly into the realm of smaller detailing parts rather than big ticket items. Just to give an idea:
-sandboxes -coal bunkers -springs -spectacle rims -backhead detail -dumb buffers -couplings -reversing lever -handrails -plumbing -crew
So I added a saddletank and firebox in the same fashion that I had built the smokebox. I then added cab sidesheets fabricated from 0.5mm plastic sheet. By painting everything black at this stage I can get a better idea of what the finished model will look like; also any bits that don't look right jump at you that bit more at a stage when it is easier to put it right.
The postman delivered a small package this morning containing etches and castings from RT Models (thanks for telling me abo
After a bit of a break from my railway activities whilst building a 1/700 Dreadnought, I'm back with something a little different.
A few years ago I bought a Bachmann Junior saddletank with the idea of turning it into one of the Metropolitan's 0-6-0 Peckett shunters. But what with Hornby bringing out a Peckett loco, and my interests starting to turn more toward the GC and waning a little regarding the Met, I have decided to turn it into something perhaps more interesting.
I've always
Whilst I've been having fun these last few weeks rebuilding some clerestory carriages using a silhouette cutter, I've also been addressing the fact that at the present I don't have a suitable suburban engine to haul them. A fair few express passenger types, but nothing really appropriate for slower stopping trains.
Now I have no shortage of the breed ready to go through the works; a Pollitt 2-4-2 and an atlantic tank amongst them, but my choice for a first backdated tank engine was an LNER
Fairly impressed by the results being shown in the Silhouette Cameo cutter thread, I decided a few months ago to save up and buy one. I haven't bought the big Cameo cutter, as that was a bit more than I was prepared to pay on what I regarded as a bit of a risk (these things rarely turn out entirely to plan), but instead bought the smaller, cheaper Portrait Cutter, with a vague idea of using it to cut the difficult beaded areas on carriage sides.
When it arrived, and after I had installed t
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, one of the roundtoit projects that has been sitting on a shelf for far too long is a rake of four Graham Farish OO mainline carriages, dating from around the 1970s.
It is my opinion that they closely resemble Robinson mainline stock of the post-1910 period and that with a little bit of work they can become quite convincing, albeit generic, GCR express coaching stock.
So here is a brake third, which I have worked on.
There has been
Tiring of blasting through a rake of PO wagons, and wanting to make a start on some projects that had been languishing on a shelf for a few years, a few weeks ago I pulled down an OO Graham Farish mainline carriage and had a good look at what it would take to GCR-ise it.
To be fair, it is already rather close. The compartment side doesn't really need anything doing to it, and the corridor side has the right arrangement of wide and narrow windows. I rather think the only real alteration ne
Over the last few years I have shared my building of locomotives (some good, some bad) and carriages (again, some good, some bad). But recently it has struck me that I've somewhat neglected the freight side of things.
Oh, I've built a couple of goods engines, and a GCR brake van (which really needs rebuilding in light of new information), and I've been lucky enough to find a couple of covered vans and coal wagons, and just recently I've completed the first of a pair of 15-ton bogie fish va
Well, here he (she?) is, pretty much finished except for the reversing gear which I still need to build. Lining is an odd mix of HMRS lining transfers (tender), freehand (cabsides) and homebrew black-biro-on-paper (boiler bands).
I am very happy with how this has turned out!- a huge improvement on what it looked like before.
