We took South Pelaw on the road for the first time in July. It mostly worked well, but a few people observed that while there were empty steel wagons going up the bank to the Consett works, there weren't any loaded wagons coming back down. Our next exhibition is in Newcastle on 10-11 November, and we plan to rectify this deficiency. We already have a good number of Plate wagons, and I have been gradually building some Cambrian kits for Bolster Ds and Boplates, which will feature in a future blog entry. What I'm going to talk about here is a Bachmann Bolster C conversion to diagram 1/471 and 1/473 wagons inspired by models built for Canada Road (see here and scroll down a bit) and Black Country Blues (see here).

This turned out to be a moderate project involving replacing the bolsters with the later pattern, the GW brake arrangements with BR brake levers, and the GWR pattern bogies with BR plate bogies. The bolsters and brake gear are available from Rumney models, and bogies from Cambrian models.

So as usual the starting point was destructive, involving the removal of the Bachmann bolsters. This is a tricky job, and the eagle eyed may see a small patch of white in this picture below, which is a gouge that has been repaired using the rather excellent Squadron Red putty. In the background is the wagon underframe, and one of the Bachmann bogie pivots has been filed down to accept the Cambrian bogie mountings.

Everything went together rather nicely in a few evenings work, resulting in a model that is pleasingly different to the standard Bachmann offering.

During the period for our model of South Pelaw, most of the steel produced by Consett works was either billet or plate according to our main source of information; some of this went to my home town of Sheffield for further processing, but most went to Jarrow. Any further information would be very welcome. Square section billet is easily made up from plastic strip.

Next step is to fabricate some securing chains, and then it is the paint shop!