And I am back! Not only doing a blog but at a model railway exhibition! Just as a visitor although this is an achievement after my Covid foiled attempt to get the layout to Ally Pally in March. It was good to get to the Bristol show on Sunday and meet up with a few familiar faces after two and a half years. Not much seems to have changed except the inevitable retreat into long sightedness over took my reluctance to carry even mild reading glasses and I now have two tints of metalic Humbrol brown paint for which I will struggle to find a use.

A more conventional brown is what I intended for this the first item of stock for the new project which was finally declared finished today. I say finished, I guess I mean ready for painting but that in itself is a huge achievement. Just to recap a little, about two years ago I decided the next project was going to be Kinver on the Kinver Light Railway. I wanted something a bit unusual and a 3ft 6in semi rural tram model certainly fits that bill. As this was completely uncharted territory and as you might expect, commercial support is zero, I decided to concentrate on the stock first. About a year ago I gave you the first glimpse of my attempts. I quickly became apparent that if I was ever going to complete the twenty vehicles I planned a new tack was needed. This was designing my own etches of course but unfortunately this meant learning CAD which was a bit drawn out and not very blog worthy. 

So here we have the results of my first solo etching attempt. The subject is the Kinver milk van which was based on one of the original cars used on the line but later converted to accommodate the considerable  dairy trade in the area. As this was the smallest and simplest cars this was the obvious place to start. The few pictures I took during construction have disappeared somewhere but it all went together surprisingly easily although the final detailing seems to have taken an age. So here we have Ernie ( older readers will get the name!), all ready for painting. 

The roof is 3D printed with some etched details. I prototyped it on my machine but this version is from Shapeways who managed a much better finish and was only seven quid. Before I show you the chassis I will explain the reasoning behind it. Over the last year there have been quite a number of prototype chassis kindly and expertly made for me by Trevor. As our aim was to keep everything out of sight as much as possible, several rather tiny and over hyped motors were tried but this only resulted with the test track being renamed 'The Wall of Death'! So, for this one we decided that as there were no windows it would be given the biggest, most bullet proof mechanism possible so that if everything else were to fail at least we would have one which worked. The frames were pantograph milled and the wheels hand made then attached to a reincarnated computer printer and here we have it;

Well it looks good and it will trundle around all day. Everything has now been cleaned up and was etch primed this afternoon. Seven more etches are sitting here waiting for attention for two more tram types so there will be more soon.