I've finally taken some decent photos of the Chiver J class, in all it's late 1940s grottyness.

I've also done some more work on the T1. Friday afternoon was spent constructing a replacement bogie out of nickel silver. I decided that the lump of whitemetal provided with the kit wasn't worth bothering with.

The new bogie supports the rear end of the loco in a way unknown to the designers of 0-4-4T kits in the early 1980s. I had a good read of an Iain Rice article in an early MRJ, which whilst intended for a full compensated chassis is still relevant. The bogie slides in a slot to give it a decent amount of sideplay, which also involved enlarging the frame cut outs to clear the wheels (odd, considering this is designed for 1980s OO wheels with huge flanges running round train set curves). I've yet to experiment with side control springing - this can wait until pickups are fitted.

All of the soldering on the body is now complete. I added a fair bit of extra detail, and then took a nice long shot so you can't see most of it. There are injectors under the cab, buffer beam detail and various other odds and ends. No steam pipes are fitted, as I'm basing this on photos of E75 taken in August 1930.

I'm now fitting the castings. These need a fair amount of work to clean them up- most of them should be usable, but they aren't the greatest I've ever seen..