With the 5 new PMVs sent on to the Paint Shop, Honley Tank’s Assembly Shop started on the refurbishment of an ancient locomotive crane.

What that really means is that a few months ago my good friend and next-door neighbour gifted me a nearly completed Airfix, 15T Locomotive Crane; one of the old 3/- plastic kits. How many of you remember it? Here’s the box:

The kit was complete except for the rigging, but of course with the original moulded plastic, ‘oo’ gauge wheels and painted with gloss black and silver as per the kit’s instructions. Ugh!

The model truly is not up-my-street but I respect this friend too much to say so; indeed I felt that I should modify it for use on one or other of my EM or S4 layouts, and close inspection of the general construction suggested that modification should not be a particularly difficult job. I would need to drill out the plastic pivots for the cab and for both bogies and this would break the model down to body, underframe and bogies.

Like the wheels, the bogies could not be converted to any of the wider gauges but I could retain the moulded plastic side frames, (at least the cosmetic bit) and make two, simple, brass framed working bogies with pin-point bearings spaced to accept modern 26mm pin-point axles and P4 metal tyred wheels, sticking the Airfix moulded frames to my new bogy frames.

New bogy pivots would be required, probably 8BA threaded rod, and there may be sufficient plastic left to drill & tap holes to hold them. This proved to be incorrect but by some judicious adding of plasticard around the pivot points, the hole depth was increased slightly and the grip of the 8BA thread was boosted by epoxy resin. The screw thread is only the fixing point, the true pivot is a spigot on the end of a specially made retaining ‘nut, the spigot being a nice rolling fit in the bogie pivot hole.

The cab pivot point was more substantial and an 8BA screw has simply replaced the cab pivot and allows simple separation of cab from underframe. I don’t want to pivot the cab These two pics show the new pivots:-

The new bogies were soldered up from 0.012” nickel silver, the side frames being simple rectangles with length and depth equal to max length and depth of the cosmetic side frames. Same material for the stretcher which was about 8mm wide with central hole and cut to a length which gave a snug fit for 26mm axles. Sorry, I did not record that dimension!

Holding all parts in correct location ready for soldering involved a pair of 26mm axles, a block of balsa and numerous household sewing pins; see picture:-

Actually that pic is a cheat! It was an afterthought because I forgot to do it when I was actually soldering. Also when actually soldering, the axles were in the bearings and, apart from giving correct position this allowed for checking all-round parallelism and gave the pins something to push against. Good stuff for this kind of work is thickish balsa!

The next pictures show the vehicle in a train posed on Birch Vale where it has had a few brief running sessions, as it has also on Bowton’s Yard. With successful running trials over it’s now been sent to the paint shop. The crane jib needs a runner and in these pictures that duty is down to two single bolster wagons but if the jib is carried by a bolster on one of these it causes derailment, so the jib is held clear of resting on the runner by a judiciously placed cosmetic bolt of wood on the crane’s running plate! (Crafty or what?)

The brief research I did was much aided by like-minded friends on E4um and from that I am aware that these cranes were much too modern for the era I model, and current knowledge is that BR ordered a small quantity for use in the Western Region mainly for the Structural Engineering Dept. So for me they are out of era and out of area. At only 15 ton capacity they were certainly not brake-down cranes as used by any MPD which I had always thought the Airfix kit to be about.

Nice little exercise of the little grey cells but not a very suitable vehicle for me.