Cheddar P4 - August 2019 update
Inbetween building the goods shed and drawing up the artwork for the station building, which has now arrived, I've been building a twin set AEC railcar set for Cheddar. This is from a set of etches from Worsley Works. To be fair, they are sold as a set of scratch aids, but I've found it all quite a challenge. Unfortunately the etches contain a number of errors which regrettably I didn’t discover until fairly late on.
Notably, the windows in the rail car sides are set too low, with the exception of the central door. For some reason they’ve all been set about 1.5mm too low whereas they should all be at the same level. The drawings in the Judge book clearly show it though I’ll admit I didn’t notice at first. The problem became apparent when I started to paint and line the rail cars. The line between crimson and cream should be at the top of the sloping triangular fillet in the front nose, then continue at that level along the body side. I’ve had to bend the lining round to have it in the correct place at the crease in the nose front, otherwise it would have been too low. It’s one of those things that some people undoubtedly won’t notice but once you know it’s there it does kind of leap out at you. I've let Allen know at Worsley and he says he's corrected the etch now. He has offered me a replacement should anyone else order one so I've no complaints there.
The droplight for the front door is the right size, unfortunately the window opening is too large so the droplight isn’t very effective. I formed some new ones from painted plasticard but I can see in the photo one needs more attention.
I deviated from the intended chassis construction arrangement as the skirt section is supposed to join to the body at top of skirt, but is too narrow resulting in an obvious join. I cut the chassis parts in half longitudinally and soldered to the body sides.
I used Lima mouldings for the railcar bogie side frames from Peter’s Spares, coach corridor connections were from MJT and I used Kadee No 21 couplings to represent the knuckle/buck eye connectors.
I‘ve used a Replica motorised chassis to power the railcar no 36 (the restaurant car). This is the 57ft version cut and shut to match the reduced wheelbase. I used one of their mark 1 coach interiors in the unpowered car, cut and shut to fit the seating arrangement. The unpowered car No 35 sits on MJT CCT's.
It does look at home on the layout, though the sides issue will niggle me for a while. Just wish I'd spotted it earlier!
Next will be the long build of the station building. I've a large box of bits to work my way through but it should be fun.
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