Well as the little cherubs at work very kindly allowed me nearly two hours of uninterrupted sleep this evening before calling me to kindly illustrate another example of their mind blowing ineptitude.

So as I wait to see if the "intellectual giants" have the ability to remain conscious and follow the simplest of commands, I thought I would let you know about the progress of my latest project, that is if anyone is interested :if)

As you know I model the years prior to the dark day the railways were nationalised, which means the majority of my stock requires some form of alteration if its from an RTR source. A couple of my pet hates (and I have many) are empty cabs and tenders that are always filled to the brim with moulded coal.

So in an attempt to improve this situation on some of the as yet untouched members of the fleet I headed to the spare room to select my latest victims. I was lucky on the weekend, as the Domestic Overlord was feeling a little ill (no I don't mean I was happy they were sick) what I mean is because I am a totally selfless person I despatched the DO off to bed to get some rest, which meant I could have a couple of hours to "play with my choo choo's".

So I took a selection of locomotives downstairs, armed myself with some superglue a Stanley knife, a selection of paint and other bits and bobs and set to work.

First this to attack was tenders, like most N gauge modellers I al well aware that the Farish Fowler tender is far to long, and that scale kits are available (I have a load in the to-do-drawer), but they are quite heavy, and there are some simple improvements you can apply to the tenders to make them look better.

So armed with the mini drill I drilled a series of holes as close to the tender sides as I dared, then joined them up and removed the moulded in coal, while I was at it I attacked the Duchess tenders in the same way.

This is one of those deep breath moments as you always worry you will make a mess of things but its not that bad, a few minutes work with the knife and all traces of the original coal load is removed, I then apply a few strokes with a file to tidy up the sides and they are ready for the next step (its tempting to try to thin the tops to near scale thickness but this can be a bad idea, so I generally just try to thin them a little).

The next stage is to decide how "full" you want the tenders to be and then cut some plati-card to form the base of the coal load. I know the Duchess locomotives had coal pushers and I intend to model these at some stage but these two (recent Evilbay bargains) are just going to have slightly empty tenders.

Once the glue has dried I normally paint the area black, in preparation for a real coal load to be added, for the fowler tender I intend to model it as one with the tender vents at the back of the tender, so at this stage I'm not too worried about their absence. Seeing as I had the superglue nearby a locomotive crew was soon firmly attached to my fingers, a few minutes work alter and I had managed to get them in the Crags cab and the Scots too.

To me the tender already looks much improved on the original? Seeing as I have finally got the Scot running sweetly after removing all that DCC rubbish and hard wiring it (long story), I thought it need a little weathering as even LMS express locomotives got dirty (some even filthy) so I applied the first stage by painting the cab roof, smoke box, deflectors and front footplate areas a dirty black colour.

Which even if you leave it at this, gives to my eyes a least and improvement on the standard out of the box model, and more of an impression of a real loco? While I had the paint out I decided to paint all the wheel edges on the Duchess's to help hide the overscale look, and of course on any of the highly visible contacts, and that was about as far as I got

What I need to do now is figure out where I have safely stored my coal, figure out which LMS liver to apply to the Duchess loco's and if one should be a Semi? and apply some head lamps, but most importantly hide the evidence of yet more trains from the Domestic Overlord.

If anyone wants to find out if I manage to make a real "hash" of these projects, or if the Domestic Overlord finally works out how many trains I have and kills me, there may be an update following soon, but until then as ever Happy Modelling