Tonight I have been trying to finish off the last few of my Christmas wagons to get them ready for paint. The aim being to get them all primed on Monday if its dry.

The last job is one I always hate to do, fitting break gear and adding suspension springs and axle boxes.

The former is only really an annoyance on wagons with seperate brakes (as per the lner 1 plank, 5 plank and van shown above) the problem being that the suspension unit sits across where the plastic was intended to go. It's times like this that I wish there was a fold up brake gear on the etch...

The other wagons (Cambrian lms / midland vans and lms 5 plank) had muh easier brakes to fit!

I much prefer the Cambrian chassis design to parksides, seperate axel boxes are so mic easier to work with just needing the spring to be carefully chopped from the moulded w iron. In contrast the parkside moulded wiron wih integral axle box (likewise for Coopercraft) needs a lot more thinning to be useful.

Such a shame Cambrian have now moved to one piece chassis that are a lot more difficult to work with (from a sprung point of view). Thankfully ebay is full of cheap old kits...

The midland van has been fitted with newer lms buffers, following a photo in the Geoff Kent book, although of a different with horizontal rathe than vertical planks. The reason, they are easier to drill for sprung buffers than the original mr patten...

The Bachmann conflat will now be fitted with brakes springs and axle boxes , (left over Cambrian) along with brake leavers from parkside

Finally in the foreground is the first of the next batch of wagons, an old parkside lms 3 plank. Nice old kit design with a flat underside to the floor, but still the annoying intergrated axleboxes!

Also have another ratio iron mink which will be built as a gunpowder van...

The next batch of wagons will be great western I promise, aiming to get some parkside gw vans at the Bristol show, along with a mass exchange of oo wheels to p4...