I've not done much modelling over the summer, mainly due to being busy at work. But recently I'd finished off a few projects, and attacked my pile of unbuilt kits

This plywood shockvan is a Red Panda kit bought off eBay, although they now seem to be back in to production again. It's been painted but unlettered for a while, so a burst of activity saw it finished.

The later shock wagon square markings were done using the white lines that come on the HMRS wagon transfer sheet. These were used to form squares which were in-filled with white paint. The stripes on the end were hand painted - the ends are so filthy they hardly show.

Another long term workbench resident was this Slater's MR van - a pretty standard build of the kit, with ABS buffers and brake gear. It had a spot of extra rivet detail added from plasticard scraps.

Two more lurkers are the Parkside GWR open (left), and a David Geen LSWR meat van (right).The Parkside open was built straight from the kit as a fitted diagram O15 with sheet bar. The Achilles heel of this kit is the sheet rail - it relies on a flimsy plastic moulding at each end, and I've broken both ends during painting. It's currently being stuck together with superglue and will have a tarpaulin fitted to give it extra strength.

The Geen LSWR van has featured in this blog before (a long time ago). It's a nice whitemetal kit, but I struggled with the brake gear - I found the etched components too flimsy to I substituted MJT brake shooes and parts from a Mainly Trains etch. After several years of being banished to a box it's progressing slowly again, but still isn't finished.

The middle vehicle is a Chiver's SR meat van. This was bought off eBay a couple of years ago and built over a week and a half - I found it very straightforward to build although the ends were a bit flimsy and easy to bend if you are cackhanded like me....

I did replace the etched brake gear with some more robust looking ABS parts. Both meat vans will be finished in SR livery.

Another EBay purchase is this D&S Chatham third. It cost me £30 about a year ago, which goes to show that these kits don't always go for stupid money. A very simple build, like most of the the D&S kits I've built.

Built as per the kit instructions, with some extra detail to represent an electrically lit example (as best as I could, given a lack of decent photos). It's based on a loose Third that lurked as a strengthening vehicle on the Hythe branch in the early 1930s, and judging by the R W Kidner photo of it at Sandgate ,was probably best avoided if it turned up in your train.

If I can track down another of these vehicles, they'll go quite nicely with a Branchlines brake and a suitable ex-SER loco. There's a lovely photo of a SER B class, two Chatham 6 wheel coaches and a SER brake at Dungeness in the 1920s I'd like to replicate in model form one day....