While studying the Ffarquhar Branch, I found out that the Reverend W Awdry made 3 models of Thomas for his layouts. From the late 1940's to the late 60's Thomas was portrayed by a Stewart Reidpath tank engine. But as the manufacturer was no longer in business, some spare models were needed incase anything should happen if the Reidpath model should fail or would require servicing. Thomas' 2nd spare model was a repainted Tri-ang Jinty and this was put into service when The Reverend built his last model railway, Ffarquhar MrkII. Then sometime afterwards Hornby Railways brought out the LBSCR E2 locomotive. This was then used as Thomas' 3rd spare model and unlike the previous two, this model was a close representation of the character in the books before his incident with the station master's house in Book no.16.

To replicate this model was very straight forward. Now you will have read in my previous blog post that I was looking information in various items. One of which was converting the model to have Romford wheels. At first I thought he procedure was difficult as there was very little guidance/video demonstration on how to do it. But after some time and experimenting with different wheels, the conversion was easy enough to do. With the wheels fitted and the chassis tested, the next stage was modifying the bodywork. the first thing I had to do was to strip off the yellow lining and lettering from the model. This was done by submerging the body shell in pure Dettol for 24hrs. The black areas still showed once i washed off the Dettol but that didn't matter as it was going to be painted black again anyway. Now one thing I noticed with the Reverend's models was many of them had very basic buffer beams. By meaning is that they were simply a flat service and buffers, no coupling hooks and very rarely, brake pipes. This could be due to the S&W coupling system the layouts had and this would have prevented the coupling hooks from catching on any features of the locomotive. This was carried onto the model and the footplate was also altered to have the back dip straightened. Now please bare in mind that I made this model using only one photograph of the model which you can find here on this website: http://www.pegnsean.net/~railwayseries/thomas.htm

The extended tanks came next which were easy enough to make up and fit on the model.
The last items to fit was the buffers and some spare steps.

After applying filler into areas where gaps could be found, I primed the model and painted it up in Thomas's livery. Paints I used are as follows:

Humbrol Paints

• 109 WWI Blue
• 60 Scarlet
• 33 Black
• 54 Brass
  

Now there are some areas where I need to apply the Brass colour but for the moment this can wait.
For Thomas' lining I tried out 0.5 red pin stripe. Now this mightn't be the best method to go by but it turned out alright. a touch of varnish and that should seal it in place.
The last thing was to give Thomas his famous No.1, which is an LMS number decal, and add loco crew into his cab.

Not a bad wee model to build and hope it will provide good service to the Ffarquhar Branch at it's next show.