Its taken a little longer than I expected to get all the bits and pieces to get this project moving but I have been making a bit of progress on converting the Farish Class 159 into a Centro Livery class 323 EMU.

I have started painting the brass etches and I am looking at how best to colour the air dam at the front. The Electra Grapics could be used to cover these areas but I am not sure whether it might be better to paint them white and see what that looks like first.

I started stripping the paint off the trailer car in the 159 set which required about an hours worth of work to get it pretty much clear. I might need to go back to this one though as there were a few stubborn parts of the paintwork.

One thing that I forgot to consider when buying the donor unit was the roof colour. Unfortunately the South West livery on the units goes onto the roof and this meant that I have had to respray the roofs grey. This is probably a blessing since the grey I chose to respray the roofs with looks a little more prototypical.

The section I am least looking forward to doing is the removal of the pantograph bay. I am worried that my filing will not be accurate enough and that copious amounts of Milliiput will be required for filling my mistakes!!!

I intend to do another coat of paint on the etches and it will take a few days worth of work to get to the next stage which is cutting off the front ends with a razor saw. This is another bit I am worries about because I am not certain of the best technique to cut the front ends off. I suspect it will probably go awry but since I could get replacement bodies off ebay for about a tenner I am not too worried, but I would prefer to try and get it right first time...

At the weekend I had a good session on Nevic Entier, I decided to see how much of my SNCF stock I could get onto the track with the idea that I might run it a bit like a preserved railway, it also gave me a chance to try out my new Roco carriages which are SUPERB!!!!). It was good fun and I took a few pictures:

I also took this view of the main fiddle yard and the scenic side showing the small station halt.

In the coming days I shall be doing a bit more scenic modelling on the small extension section as well as tidying up the town area. I now know what kit I need to almost finish the town section. Once the road has been extended and repainted I will start considering adding some people to the town. Also I shall be starting the work on the next set of scratchbuilt buildings (I am actually really keen to get started, which is funny because I was moaning about not doing it again a few blogs ago!!!).

Thanks for reading

Stephen