Last time (over a month ago- really?) I introduced the thinking behind my replacing my current compound Jersey Lily.

The first thing to do was to introduce the Patriot chassis to the body and to make notes of where to cut. There was a fairly large lump to remove from the front of the chassis and another hefty piece to remove from the back, so it was out with the dremel and, over the course of a few evenings, these areas were cut away and discarded. I now had a chassis block that would fit, neatly, into the body.

I was then able to reinstate the driving wheels and look to the valvegear.

This was the point when the project started going in large, slow and sadly pointless circles.

The valvegear on the Hornby chassis is screwed into the centre driving wheels and merely push-fit into the front and rear driving wheels. In this instance I had removed the rear axle, so the connecting rods pretty quickly worked loose and fell away. When the cylinders were added I also found that the coupling rods fouled the crossheads and that the whole model could just lock up tight.

My solution to this was threefold; firstly the crosshead brackets were removed from the Bachmann cylinders and replaced with those from the Hornby Patriot; then the connecting rods were swapped over from the Bachman Robinson type to the Hornby Patriot type. This loosened things up a bit but everything was still apt to bind up quickly. So secondly the cylinders were removed from the model, their tiebar cut through and a new tiebar made up of plastic sheet to set the cylinders 1.5mm further apart. This is wider than scale but not by so much as to appear ridiculous. When tested this also improved reliablity to the point that the only problem was the coupling rods dropping out of the leading axle. So I bought a set of Hornby A1/A3/A4 driving wheels and the matching coupling rods for same, which screw into all three axles. I replaced the driving wheels entirely, retained the original coupling rods and replaced the pins in the end with screws. The result is a very sweet-running chassis; we got there in the end!

Having gotten it all to run, I then had to remove the wheels and valvegear as I had decided to permanently fix the chassis onto the body.

The stage I am now at, then, is returnig the body from a 1930s/ 1940s appearance to how the locomotive appeared in the 1920s. This largely consists of removing the snifting valve and replacing the safety valves.