I’ve had one of the 2mm Scale Association’s etched kits for the LNWR diagram 88 van for quite some time and as a change from laying roof slates on my model of Tavistock’s train shed roof, thought the Christmas and New Year holidays would be an ideal time to make a start on it.

The kit is etched entirely in nickel silver and has been described by several people as “challenging”. The main reason for this is probably because of the extremely delicate nature of the etched strapping overlay as can be seen from the picture below. In this picture, I have already soldered the doors in place – the kit giving an option of either LNWR or LMS styles. Although my model is set in LMS days, I decided to model the van as one that had retained all its LNWR features. The doors are rather a loose fit in the hole left for them in the etched sides so I had to place spare pieces of etch behind the joins to hold the doors in place.

The kit instructions talk about folding up the van sides first and then adding the strapping. I felt I would have more chance of getting the strapping in the correct place if I worked with the van still flat. The only thing to be careful of if doing it this way is to make sure that the top corners of the side strapping that will wrap round the ends do not get soldered to the ends at this stage – a thin piece of packing under the sides allows the ends to be bend down just enough to keep the wrap around unsoldered.

No doubt the best way of attaching the strapping might be with an RSU but since I do not have one, I used normal soldering methods - I tinned the back of the strapping with a small amount of solder, held it in position with a small piece of masking tape, applied lots of flux and used a very clean iron with virtually no solder on it so as not to leave stray solder on the surface of the van.

The above picture shows that a couple of the long thin diagonal straps have some slight kinks in them. You really only get one go at soldering such delicate pieces in place – I tried a bit of careful straightening but if I got one kink straightened out, another one seemed to be introduced – so I quit before it got any worse. The problem with pictures that can be enlarged to about gauge 1 size is that they show up problems that may never actually be visible at normal viewing distance especially once painted and weathered.

The two substantial wooden stanchions on each end of the van are made up from three layers of etch, the middle one having locating tabs. The picture below shows the three parts as supplied on the etch and a completed stanchion below.

Again I decided not to follow the kit instructions which suggest soldering the centre piece to the van end first and then adding the side pieces to it. I thought this was likely to cause me to get too much stray solder on the van so I joined the three pieces together first and then soldered the completed stanchion to the van end. This seemed to work reasonably well as can be seen in the picture below.

Now I was ready to fold up the van and solder the wrap round top corner strapping into place. Enlarging the picture below shows that one end of the X strapping is a bit short at the top right hand corner – once all the soldering is complete, I’ll see if I can superglue a small piece of plastic into the gap.

Buffer beams are included on the etch for the chassis but actually need to be soldered to the van body. They are a two layer etch with the inner layer having a tab which fits up the inside of the van end so that the outer layer is flush with the van end. As with the van doors, both LNWR and replacement LMS styles are included and I chose to use the LNWR ones.

Also at this stage, the bottom corner plates on each side need to be soldered in place. As can be seen from the first picture, they are basically rectangular in shape but are etched with one corner cut off. The only picture I had of an actual van seemed to show purely rectangular plates so I could not see why the cut off corner existed on the etch. I decided perhaps it was to fit next to the end of the buffer beam that was slightly wider that the van sides so fitted them that way round with enough solder to cover the joins and be filed back so that a reasonably neat square corner could be achieved.

Finally, I was ready to add the roof and again, I chose to use the LNWR ribbed version. Hopefully some vans in their original LNWR style survived till well into the LMS era and someone might be able to recommend a suitable number for when I get to the painting and lettering stage.

My photograph (from the LNWR Society’s website) seemed to show that the original style roof was an exact fit and did not overhang either the sides or the ends. The etched roof supplied was a perfect fit for length but was about half a millimetre too wide each side which meant some very careful filing was needed so as not to damage the adjacent strapping.

The final photograph is below – it reveals a few areas I may need to improve and careful inspection with a magnifying glass may show up a few more. In particular, I want to improve the join where the folded up side meets the end (the interlocking tabs are still visible) and also add a little solder to the top of the stanchions so they can be filed square and flush to the top of the roof - hopefully this will also hide the fact that they are made from three layers which is currently still apparent.

Next weekend I'll have a go at the chassis.