Yesterday was the North East Area Group meeting of The 2mm Scale Association. We had a short overview/history from Mick Simpson on the various wagon chassis available over the years.

Then a good number of us sat down to progress various chassis building projects.

See http://neag.2mm.org.uk/ for more detail and a few pics.

Within my own fleet of stock, I have a number of wagons that run on the Mike Bryant etched chassis. These date from the early eighties, use wheels on 13mm axles and to be fair, are a bit problematic. Wheels will often drop out, and being brass they are prone to damage more than the newer nickel silver etches. This is the underside of a Midland 3 plank featuring such a chassis:

I have toyed with replacing these chassis for some time now and the workshop produced a chassis suitable for the said replacement. Removal of the old chassis was fairly straightforward with a scalpel blade, but it did dislodge one of the body ends which to be reaffixed. I also had to remove some of the new chassis to fit it between the wagon headstocks. Here is a comparison of one wagon in original state and the conversion requiring painting:

To be honest, I'm not sure that the work involved is worth it. I'll paint this one up, but leave the other wagons on their old chassis and live with their foibles. I need to spend more time working on new stock rather than trying to resuscitate these older efforts.