Some progress on my coach building.

The two Phoenix Maunsell coaches are now painted in 1930s Southern Olive Green. I've cheated with the lining - it should be a yellow line with a black line inside it, but I've only done a yellow line. My defence is insanity (avoidance of). The lining is from HMRS pressfix, with the corners added by hand.

The interiors are now added - Southern Pride seats and Slater's passengers. All a little crude, but good enough when the roof is on.

The Worlsey Works Thanet third is nearing completion (and did you know that Chrome's built in spell checker doesn't have Thanet in it's dictionary?).

This went together in much the same way as their Continental. I used a Southern Pride Mk1 roof, and replaced the solebars with Evergreen plastic channel. There's nothing wrong with the etched ones supplied in the kit, but I cocked up bending one of them to shape.

Plastic solebars also avoid the fun of soldering the foot boards in to place. The various underframe details are Comet, the battery boxes are scratchbuilt and the bogies are from NNK (now available again and my first choice for SR 8' steam bogies).

Lastly, a model from the box of long term incomplete projects has been completed.This is one half of Pull-Push set 609, and has been built from an Ian Kirk kit (which I bought from Colin Ashby's stand at the Derby show in the Assembly rooms just in case you wondered how long it's been lurking half complete in a shoebox).

This has had quite a lot of work done on it - the body has been increased in height by 1mm, and a scratchbuilt underframe fitted. The roof was reprofiled as the Kirk roof is way too wide and had a horrible thick cantrail, and most of the end detail replaced.

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I have the Parts (including the Branchline conversion kit) to make the driving trailer, which should follow during 2012.

One thing to watch with push pull sets 600-619 is the orientation of the trailer third. The outer end has the corridor connector removed and heavy duty EMU buffers fitted. This varies from coach to coach - some have the end with the alarm gear sealed up and some the other. To make matters even more fun the Southern never painted the set number on the inner end of pull-push sets, so it took a lot of peering at photos to work out which way round my chosen set was orientated.