It's all right and it's coming along

We've got to get right back to where we started from

(Maxine Nightingale, "Right back where we started from")

If Wikipedia is to be believed - and when is it not - J. Vincent Edwards and Pierre Tubbs knocked off their plinkety-plonkety classic in a mere seven minutes while driving to the local hospital to visit Tubbs' wife, who was about to give birth (although they did cheat a bit in that they used a tune that Edwards had written several years earlier). I always find these stories of huge success on the back of little or no effort - like smug youths describing how they reeled into their exams after partying till dawn, only to emerge with straight As - rather hard to believe. Nevertheless, it's safe to say that even if they'd spent days over every word and weeks over each note, they'd still have taken less time over it than it's taken me to get my replacement batch of IHAs up to the same state that the original ones were in when I discovered that they were the wrong size.

For various reasons, this project has been very stop-start. Things have moved on a bit, though: so far, at least, these wagons are squarer and neater than the old ones and I'm reasonably confident that they're going to turn out all right. They look pretty messy at the moment, which is partly because I distress the surface with a scriber to give the filler something to key onto; and partly because the black styrene bleeds its colour all over the place when you brush solvent onto it.

The hoods on these wagons "hang" in different ways, which is something that I'm trying to recreate. The various bits of rod stuck to the inner "core" of the wagon should act as guides for various fold patterns. I expect to be doing some sculpting of the filler as well.

And that's the way it is. More progress soon, I hope. Maybe even before the end of the year...