Well this really is the home straight for the project.

First job is to cut away the coach under chassis cowling from the Hornby chassis. I'm not going to go into how I did it, just to say take your time and be careful. When done it's just a case of using Devcon or similar to stick it to the Bachmann chassis. Obviously make sure you get it central etc etc etc.

The seating can go. I did consider slicing the very ends of and finding a way to secure them to the inside of the carriage so as to give a representation of the seating as of course the motor, flywheels and drive shafts are in the way for the full seats to be replaced.

What I did go for was to tint the windows. Which is a little more prototypical and something I have wanted to do to all of my Mk3's and Mk2's.

Now Hurst's used to sell a tinting film to do such a job. But I headed off down to my local Auto Parts emporium and bought a roll of the stuff that they use on cars, vans, trucks etc. The roll is about 75 cm wide by 2 meters long and cost about £17. I reckon used sparingly I could get about 90 full 12 car rakes out of it!!!!!!!

The colour isn't quite right. It should be more of a brown'ish tint than it is, but I like it and it works well. Though the application is as the instructions and requires a degree of patience.

The tint is enough to obscure the drive mechanism for general running, but isn't strong enough to block viewing it completely. Again a compromise but I think it looks OK.

I did add two plasticard platforms at each end to give the body of the carriage support as it sits on the chassis. The under frame cowling sits just proud of the chassis on each side, so this provides more support for the body.

It works!!!! and quite a straightforward conversion.

To finish I just need to pop a decoder in and fabricate a nut bolt fixing through the chassis and the plasticard platforms within the body to keep it all together.

How useful my finished carriage is, is open to discussion. It does provide my Virgin rake with much quieter running. Though I need to look at the linkage between it and the class 90 loco. it might provide useful to those who are running scale rakes and require a little extra pull.

Most of all for a first time bash at something that didn't come with a list of parts and instructions. I was quite pleased with my improvisation.

Hope it might encourage others to take on similar first time projects.