7th January 2010 - heres hoping the blog problem is fixed soon, running out of times to set that will keep new posts at the top of the list!

Having ran out of work to do on the 59s, and lacking parts to work on the 73s (wheels), buildings (brick sheet), 325 (new ends), FGAs (instructions!) I have turned attention back to my Class 47 fleet.

I started off fitting 47709 with the new Shawplan roof grills, (so thats now the whole fleet fitted), once that was out the way made a start on detailing underframes.

47709 uses the Vi Trains air pipes, a Heljan vac pipe and the Vi Trains socket on the lower left. The body mounted ETH socket is from Heljan, as are the multiple working jumpers.

47768 again uses the same, but has the better quality Bachmann part for the ETH socket.

47813 has a buffer beam mounted ETH, so this uses the two Heljan parts along with Vi Trains air pipes. In each case they were superglued into position and then painted (with the exception of the ETH bits that were painted before fitting.

Buffers were superglued to the bufferbeams, which will in turn be glued to the body once I have fitted screwlinks. Annoyingly on one loco the buffer head snapped off after fitting so will need replacing...

I've finally got round to respraying the yellow ends on 709, followed by fitting the hand rails. I was then planning on respraying the grey roof tomorrow, before remembering that I need to convert the boiler port plating to the rectangular type (given the lack of etches available for this I need to fabricate a new part, for which I need to source the dimensions.) I may end up just spraying it grey anyway, and paint the new boiler panel off the model so as not to hold things up....

The final job was fitting the etched plates to 47768, this required carefully reducing the size of the printed plates. Given that the usual method dosnt work on Vi Trains paint, I carefully scraped off the ends of the printed name. while this worked on the first side of the first plate, the other sides ended up going through to the white base requiring a slight touch up (need to buy some RES red when I next see Shawplan!) The damaged paint is so small that tbh it would be possible to hide with weathering, but I'd rather do it properly (thankfully it is so small that brush painting will be fine for it!)

Will also pick up the paint for the roof on 768 and 813 when I next see Brian to sort those out as well...

I have a Virgin Trains body coming from Pixie which will sort out my final 47 (for now at least) Getting very tempted to use this as the basis for my model of 813 (given that it has the correct nameplates for that loco, and in the current condition needs renumbering to keep it in Virgin.) meaning that my Intercity loco would either get a Virgin respray, or renumbered to a Virgin owned Intercity 47. Still, this is a slightly more long term decision, as I have only done the absolute basics of planning for its scratch built chassis based around a pair of Heljan bogie towers. This has prompted the decision to sell off two of my final 3 Heljan 47s, with 853 in XP 64 being the only one remaining (and thats out of period anyway!)