Prompted by the burst of progress on the FFA/FGA sets, I thought I'd dust off another long-stalled project, this being an attempt at producing an eight-car Western Region Pullman set. I started getting the bits for this together long before the Bachmann model was announced, and I must admit although I carried on the with the best of intentions, the arrival of Bachmann's Midland Pullman did take the wind out of my sails a bit, in that it's a superb model which definitely (for me, at least) scratches the Blue Pullman itch. In other words, I'm not sure I'd bother now. But, I'd made enough progress to justify continuing and the recent acquisition of another BP centre car - for a mere fifteen pounds - was even further incentive to look at how far I'd got. On the subject of the centre cars, I found three or four for sale at less than twenty pounds each at a second-hand stall at a recent model show, suggesting that the market for these has taken a bit of tumble. Admittedly they were all fairly scruffy but if you're contemplating this sort of conversion project, that won't matter too much. I was paying thirty or forty or more ten years ago, and some of those were in fairly tatty condition.

So - where was I? I'd made most of the bogies, acquired the coaches and etched window replacements, and had already grafted new noses onto the Triang driving cars. The bogies are from Chris Leigh, while the noses are from Genesis and the etched sides from Southern Pride. The driving vehicle uses a pair of Black Beetles. I have a couple of spare coaches of the reversed blue/grey variant, which (I discovered) don't have removable window inserts, but these are still useful for seats and underframe parts. If Triang hadn't felt the need to add tension lock couplers to the front, incidentally, then they could have modelled the noses with the buffer beam at the correct depth, and avoided the need for these new castings. I wonder how many people really needed to be able to couple things onto the front of their Blue Pullmans? I bet no one would have minded if there hadn't been couplers.

This week I made a few more tweaks to the motorised power car, adjusting the bogie placements to get them as close to reality as is practically possible given the Triang parts. I also made some more progress on the first of the two Parlour Seconds, one of which is shown here. Next to be done is adjust the seats to match the correct formation for this vehicle.

The powered unit runs nice and smoothly and I've wired it up such that conversion to DCC will be pretty painless. But it remains to be seen whether it'll have enough haulage to cope with the full rake. I'm optimistic, but we'll just have to see how it manages as I add more vehicles. If it turns out not to be enough (even with moderate weighting) then I'll make the rear car powered as well.

One last issue is the final livery. It was always going to be the original BP colour scheme, but I'm increasingly toying with the idea of doing it as reversed blue/grey with yellow ends. Although it doesn't seem to have been popular, I've always found the latter scheme to be pretty smart, and at least it'll avoid comparison with the Bachmann one.