Good evening all,

A couple of blogs ago I mentioned that I would dedicate a blog to my Dapol class 56. There are very few photos of the loco in Cornwall but thankfully the legendary John Vaughan has several photos published in one or two of his books which were used as reference material. There is also a nice colour one taken by Craig in the Cornish Railways section of this site which will come in handy to get the weathering accurate at the time of the visit. I also have found some rare footage on one of my DVD's which has also come in handy.

To represent the model accurately, I purchased some Toton etched depot plaques and BR arrows from Shawplan and some loco oval brass buffers from N Brass. I will also be detailing one of the buffer beams.

First off I removed the round buffers from one end of the loco as this class 56 had round buffers to one end and oval buffers to the other when it visited Cornwall. Rather unusual, not sure if this was modified specifically for the Cornish China Clay trials. Next I fixed the depot plaques and arrows to the cab ends using photos of the prototype. These were fixed in place using Klear. The brass buffers were then added once the holes in the buffer beam had been enlarged to accommodate them. These were super glued in place once I was happy with the positioning.

Next job is to prime the buffers and fix in the jumper cables and dummy screw link coupling to the buffer beam. Some light weathering will also be added and I'll cover the finished item in part 2 of this entry hopefully by the weekend. (He says!!! )

Anyway here are some progress shots and as always, all comments and tips are most welcome.

The 56 straight out of the box

Depot plaques and arrows added

Original round buffers to one end with Toton depot plaque added

Round buffers removed and brass oval buffers added

Best regards,

Jeremy