I thought I should take the plunge and get a test item of motive power finished up ready for Rail-ex in November. I like 60s, so it's going to be 60014, which I bought locally a year or so ago but hasn't been out of the box much in the meantime apart from the occasional ogling session

First step was to fit a sound chip and speaker - this is using the Howes class 60 chip with a DCC supplies bass reflex speaker fitted above the twin grilles in place of the "doughnuts". Since my chassis is an 8-pin version, there wasn't initially room for the speaker at this end, and it doesn't really work at the other end either because the cutout for the cooler intrudes too far into the body. My solution, which may not be the best one, was to cut off the PCB mounting pins from the chassis casting and move the whole thing up a bit. I remounted the PCB on narrow strips of foam tape.

It's still a tight fit, but it's possible to get everything in this way. I did cut a roughly 2mm bevel into the body shell on the edge of the cooler cutout, this doesn't go through to the outside but gives just enough space to clear the PCB at that end. I put the decoder underneath that area as well. At least there's plenty of room for the wires The speaker wires were cut short (why do they fit this hefty wire?) and soldered end-to-end with the decoder speaker wires, a bit clunky but it's wrapped in heatshrink and then tape to keep it all together.

With the body off, I removed the jelly-like glue on the cab bulkheads and took them out so I could fit a driver. I also painted the small marker light lenses a warm yellow since they seem to be orangey-yellow rather than white on the real thing, and re-fitted the fire extinguisher which has been rattling around in one of the cabs for ages. The driver is from a cheap box of random Atlas figures, so he's a bit small. I'm almost embarrassed to show the close-up, since I haven't painted any 4mm figures before and this is painfully obvious. But better to be honest about these things I suppose... His shirt and tie colours are copied from a picture of 60014, and his jacket and trou are mixed up from a Vallejo dark blue and black. Unfortunately the blue was terribly glossy, so I gave him a coat of Humbrol Matt Cote which has helped a little. There's a little bit of "theatre makeup" shadow and highlight on the face to help it read better through the cab windows.

I made two other small changes to the cabs - one was to touch in the door frame in silver paint, since you can see this glinting in pictures of 60014 when seen end on. The other was to add a hi-vis jacket hung up behind the second seat, again based on pictures. This is just a bit of paper painted orange, with the reflective stripes added with white paint and finished in silver.

Through the cab window it all looks a lot more restrained, thankfully!

Next job is to fit the bufferbeam details and install wire loops for the Sprat and Winkle couplings. The intent is to lightly weather the loco (gulp!) to represent its condition around 2005-2006, before the beastie stickers got torn.