A few years ago I set out to build a couple of rakes of lookalike GCR mainline stock circa 1920, one of five converted from Mainline/ Bachmann LMS carriages and the other of four from Graham Farish generic types. At the same time I bought another ex-LMS carriage for eventual conversion to a restaurant car, but as this involved a lot more surgery I put it up for a while and got on with some locos instead.

A few weeks ago I dug it out and work was able to start in earnest. The first stage was to cut away the window and door mullions, and to cut away some of the panelling at both ends of the carriage. When this was done I carefully scraped away the moulded panelling with a stanley knife.

I was then able to start building up the new windows, taking a drawing in George Dow's 'Great Central volume 3' as a guide.

Now this is all very rough and ready right now of course, but the next stage will be to smooth it all down and build the window inserts proper. At which point it will, hopefully, start to look more like a carriage and less like a pile of scrap!