I've always wondered just how much work is involved in converting old Hornby short clerestories into Edwardian GCR suburban carriages. I've read it can be done, and I've seen one or two projects achieving just such a feat. I've also read in Peter Denny's 'Buckingham Great Central' that the amount of work involved meant his rake of three took as long as a scratchbuild would have done whilst giving him much less pleasure.

You can perhaps get a better understanding of my curiosity when I tell you I've no fewer than seven of these carriages in my projects box, and have been saying to myself since January that this year I will crack on with them.

Now my main problem is a lack of drawings, especially of the brake carriages. There are two drawn in George Dow's 'Great Central Railway', volume 3, of which one is an 8-compartment all-third and the other a 6-compartment composite lavatory. Now I'd be perfectly happy to let a Hornby 7-compartment clerestory do duty repainted, detailed and numbered to masquerade as the all-third but the composite intrigues me. It strikes me that the conversions descrived to date follow the lines of a repaint, changing some details and then renumbering, but what I haven't seen yet (and admittedly I've not done all that much digging) is a conversion where somebody takes the donor carriage and really 'goes to town', as it were, to produce one of the more, ahem, unusual designs.

Which is exactly why I've chosen this 6-compartment composite for the first of my rake to undergo conversion....

The first step is to take the carriage apart (the roof unscrews and the bogies unclip) and then work at it with some T-cut to get the transfers off. Considering how difficult this was on Centenary I was quite surprised how easily they dissolved and came away this time around.

Now then; from each end of the carriage we work in two compartments. These we leave well alone- they become the four third class compartments of the finished model. The next compartment along we leave the left-hand window of one and the right-hand window of the other alone. These become the lavatory windows. Now what we do is to take some milliput or white filler, and fill in the remaining windows in the middle of the carriage body. There will be two windows each in the third and fifth compartments to fill and the entirety of the fourth.

Once this has set we can set-to with a dremel and sandpaper, and start sanding the middle of the carriage smooth. Because the beading has to alter it is probably best to remove it from the middle of the carriage and replace it with microstrip later. Once this is done we should end up with something like this...

We can then turn our attentions upon the roof. There aren't really any roof details shown on the Dow drawing, so I decided to remove just the details that are obviously GWR and then have a look through my books of GCR photographs to see if I can find a decent photo of the roof details. So I removed the ventilators and the rainstrip to the clerestory. It still needs the gaps in the sides filling in.