I popped into my local modelshop for some supplies. ( Pastimes, Glasgow. All sorts of interesting stuff, lots of secondhand. ) Pottering about I noticed that oxford had added a Newbattle PO livery to the NB Jubilee wagon, so I bought one.

Well here it is out of the box. Nice crisp printing. Ok, perhaps not perfectly to the original drawings, but bearing in mind that many wagons were built to this general diagram by an assortment of builders for various customers there were bound to be variations.



Main problem, its 00. Having converted a couple of these last year I can report that EM wheels on 26 mm axles wouldn't fit, and if I used the oxford 25mm axle the rear face of the plastic W irons would need to be thinned a bit. I therefore opted to use 51L etched pre group W irons and some whitemetal axleboxes. So 5 minutes later….



The most noticeable error on the body is the loop hinges are wrong. No biggie, clip the old one off, drill 0.4 through the door, add brass ring. Also a horse shunting loop. Close up some of the bolt positions are a bit out, but from normal distances ( and given the PO variations) I’m not going to move them.



From underneath its what you would expect. The solebars just needed a tiny amount of thinning to clear the W irons. I drilled through the V casting and the end of the brakelever, a bit of brass wire gives strength and lines it all up.



There we are. A bit of detail painting and light weathering and I think it looks ok. Better than I could manage doing that livery by hand.

I know that historically it would have mainly lived in the east, but I’ll stretch a point. After all, the base wagon is less than a tenner, so I’m happy to buy one in the vague hope that rtr manufacturers see that there is a bit of a market for pre-group stock. Might even encourage them to cast their eyes to the west…..