The 4F is just about finished and ready to add to the Legge Lane roster. 44571 is the prototype and was, during the time period being modelled, a Saltley 21A locomotive. So after two Bushbury engines we now have a representative from the old MR side of the West Midlands. The period photos show several departures from the normal or standard LMS built 4F, the most obvious being the replacement of fluted connecting rods with Stanier's higher quality steel rods that didn't require fluting. It also had steam heating pipes front and rear and they have been added but using brass fittings from Laurie Griffin instead of the vulnerable white metal ones included in the box. It is painted in an ex-works (?Derby) plain black with early BR totem.

44571 would have been used on regional freights served by Saltley engines. So Bristol and Derby would be the most likely outposts, but also Leicester where I have one photo of it on shed. Its presence at the fictional Legge Lane shed would therefore be easy to explain.

The Connoisseur kit went together well and I can think of no real problem in building the loco and tender. A few mistakes of my own making have been rectified and I also added Laurie Griffin's brass Silvertown lubricators which really make a difference. The chassis could do with more detailing of the inside motion but the lubricators help to hide this omission from the kit, at least from the right hand view point. Jim McGeown's kits are advertised as "entry level" basic kits and they are certainly a good introduction for anyone entertaining etched brass kit building. With a few extra fittings they can be built to a higher level. In retrospect I would suggest that the 4F is an excellent candidate for a working inside motion kit.

So, here is 44571 on shed with its mates:

I thought long and hard about how and where to fit the DCC sound electronics and finally decided on a tender fitting. This is largely because the Belpaire fire box is not particularly large and there is no space in the boiler for the speaker. The Mashima 1833 motor already takes up a lot of space. Early on I had decided to fit an 8 pin socket next to the motor so that the decoder could be easily switched with a DC blanking plate. But this became redundant with the new plan. However, the pickups were wired to it so I left it there and fitted a new breadboard and 8 pin socket onto the tender frame.

The interior of the tender is very spacious when viewed from underneath. In fact I think the speakers from a rapper's boom box could probably fit inside. Well, perhaps not. The standard speaker could certainly be upgraded and I might yet do this. The Zimo 645 decoder has a stay alive capacitor included and I wired this into the breadboard along side the 8 pin socket.

Wired for DCC:

Wired for DC:

All that was now needed was to run four wires from the loco to the tender. In my spares box I had some thin TCS two lead connectors and decided that these would be perfect. But what struck me in a moment of "genius" was that I could use these sockets to isolate the DCC part and simply run the loco on DC. This is accomplished by adding one male lead to the motor terminals and one female lead to the pickups with their counterparts soldered to the breadboard in the tender. Disconnect the two locomotive sockets from the tender and connect them together and, "voila", DC working is achieved without removing the bodies of either tender or engine. And to remove both bodies the sprung couplers would have to be undone as well.

This system has one disadvantage - the tender emits the sound. But there is one potential advantage and that is to add pickups to the tender wheels. These would not function in DC mode, however.

The only remaining additions left are the crew which need painting. I will be using Jim McGeown's white metal figures, so they will be twins to the driver and fireman in the Jinty/Dobbin.

Edited to put the correct DC image in the right place.