I was browsing ebay US at this point and discovered a massive job lot of On30 bits from someones railway in the States. There were a lot of interesting bits, including a pair of scratchbuilt Forney locos, built on old RTR chassis. As well as those there were about 8 box cars and a ice scraping caboose. I decided not to go for the locos as they were sold as non working and as they were on old american chassis I wasn't sure about getting spares should I need them. I decided the boxcars were worth going for and bid on about 5 of them and the caboose. I won two boxcars and a rather nice water tower they were selling as well. After a two week wait the bits arrived from across the pond and I immediately set about getting them runnable.

First impressions were good. These were well made wooden models with Kadee couplers and metal wheels so I had at least won some cheap parts. The cars run on Bettendorf trucks which isn't at all right for narrow gauge but as they are low slung you cannot tell. When they arrived I tried running them only to find the couplers were set to On3 height which is about a couplers worth lower than On30 height which is the same as HO scale (so you can couple your HO scale locos to On30 stock, I guess it would make a good miniature railway model!). This was very easy to fix, I just slipped some washers between the bogies and bolsters to bring the cars to the right height. Some bits had come off the cars and these were reattached and there we had it, two well made boxcars ready for a new life working in this country. I think its a shame I couldn't get corresponding numbers (I ended up with 22 and 24) but I think its nice someone else's freelance road has contributed to another.

The water tower is a fantastic model. I think its semi scratchbuilt. The pier it sits on is wooden but the top half looks plastic so maybe its a american toy train tower detailed? Either way, it really looks the part.

Another new addition was another Porter, but this time a 0-4-2 variant. No excuse for this one, I needed another loco but this was all funds could stretch to! It had the same modification as the 0-4-0 one and was weathered and numbered as 2. Since the arrival of larger locos these Porters don't see so much action as they did but I generally keep one of the pair on the layout at one time as they are quite useful little locos. The attached picture shows number 2 with one of the imports, the flash photography has highlighted the old road name on the box car which was scrubbed off before it came here. Doesn't get much more prototypical than that! The picture also shows how suitable the cars are behind a porter, with near enough the same proportions.