One of the key requirements in my attempts to model enough coaches to allow the modelling of the Great Western Mainline in 1947, is the inter regional services I have touched on previously.

As such amongst my initial plans is a Plymouth - Liverpool service which was comprised of half GWR and half LMS (with the dining provision alternating between the two companies). Given that there are a few other formations which also have the alternating LMS diner, this seemed a good starting point. An additional bonus is that it gives a good proving coach to make sure the layout is constructed to sufficient tolerances, given there is a need for at least one 12 wheel GWR diner at some point, plus a small number of 70ft GWR coaches.

I had hoped to make my life easier and get one of the old Dapol models which came with a scale chassis, however they were selling for a lot more than the Hornby model (and the latter had far better painting.)

This leaves 4 jobs to do on the chassis (unless anyone ends up pointing out any other glaring inaccuracies)

The first was to lower the model on its bogies, as it comes I think it was riding high by something like 1mm. So I took out the trusty Xurons and chopped off the raised lugs on the underside of the chassis. Once the resulting mess had been tidied up I widened the holes in order to accept a length of plastic tube. the tube is the exact internal diameter as the bolts. An offcut of 40 thou plasticard was glued on the top of the hole (which is thin enough to avoid interfering with the interior.)

Once this was all dry the tube was fettled to ensure that the buffer height was correct, before gluing the bolts into position with Evostick.

The next job was to fill in the missing sections of solbar. For this I have started with some fettling up of the existing chassis moulding, to ensure a square joint at either end of the cut away. This was then filled with some lengths of Evergreen strip glued into position. Once dry it was skimmed with a layer of squadron white filler, before adding a 15thou flange on the bottom. A huge improvement I think, and hopefully should be fine on 3ft6 radius curves. It just might end up slightly restricted as to which fiddleyard road can be used for storage if running in the Up direction.

The remaining jobs: are to replace the horrid plastic wheels with something a bit more suitable. No idea what is necessary to get good running in OO, but I am a little concerned about the long fixed bogie with no compensation. I will give it some testing, and if there are any issues the old trick which used to work on Bachmann Co Co locos of using a fractionally (0.5mm) smaller diameter centre wheel should do the job.

The final job probably wont be fully complete until its been given a good test run, this is a case of adding the missing break hangers, along with the linkages to the bogies etc.