In the late 1830s & early 1840s railway carriages rapidly replaced stage coaches for long journeys. Trust Nigel Hill to reverse the trend by changing a railway carriage into a horse-drawn coach!
He took a Bachmann 1830s Baltimore and Ohio carriage from the de Witt Clinton set and separated the metal body from its plastic chassis. Attaching white metal cart wheels from Langley Models with superglue turned the carriage body into a reasonable representation of an early
Apologies, I realise this is quite a long post! And it doesn't finish here, either: there's a second part that I will post in a week or so. But I thought I would try and give as much info as I could about my attempts to use the Bachmann Prussia coach to produce a more representative British carriage of the early 1840s.
1) What are we working with?
The Prussia coach is a nice model moulded in green plastic with yellow window frames and brown door panels printed (I think)
Initially, early railways weren't very interested in third and fourth class passengers. Firstly they saw the big money coming from goods traffic rather than passengers anyway, a misconception that quickly vanished as the first main lines opened. Secondly, the passengers that they did want to attract were the well-heeled people who had previously travelled by stage coach, not the poorer folk who hitched a ride on the carter's wagon (or simply walked everywhere). But it didn't take railway manager
