I've been meddling with loco building. My loco building skills are pretty rudimentary but I did once (25 years ago, when my eyes were better) scratch build a compensated EM gauge chassis for my Hornby 4-4-0 County and it worked pretty well.

Those of you have been kind enough to follow my scenic developments will know that my railway is set in Mid-Wales and there was always the intention of squeezing a bit of narrow gauge in somewhere. The track is now laid, using Peco 00 gauge track with the sleepers respaced to look more like the real thing. My intention is that the track and sleepers will be pretty much covered in weeds, soil, etc when it's finished, as the narrow gauge is line is meant to look run down. To test the track and the horrifically sharp radius curves used to get into the storage area I needed a loco, and having looked at my grandson's Hornby 0-4-0's decided that would be the way to go for dipping a toe in the loco building pond again.
It occured to me that I could use the existing saddle tank, smoke box/smoke box saddle to create something like a 0-4-0 version of the Kerr Stuart 0-4-2 used on the Corris Railway and subsequently the Tallylyn.

It's probably best to draw a veil over some of my methods for fear of giving palpitations to the extremely skilled loco builders that crop up here, but basically this is what Iv'e done:

1) Chopped away the Hornby cab and part of the saddle tank
2) Built a new cab, bunker, boiler saddle from brass
3) Extended the running plates with scrap NS etch pieces
4) Used a pair of cylinders from a narrow gauge loco kit (I decided the rest of the kit was really not going to cut the mustard)
5) Used slide bars from a Hornby loco spares supplier
6) Filled in the gaps between the spokes to look more like the wheels on Corris No3 (which I know wasn't a Kerr Stuart loco).

If anyone is interested in the gory details I have taken plenty of photos along the way, but there are probably much better examples to follow than mine.

Having said all that, it does run nicely, after a fair bit of pick-up twiddling, quartering checking, back to back checking etc etc.

Many many thanks to micknich2003 who very kindly offered to make the brass spectacle frames for the cab and did them beautifully.

The plan is use printable water slide decal paper to do the lining and so forth, which should be an interesting experiment, as I can easily create the artwork needed, but that will have to wait until quite a few more details have been added.