During South Pelaw’s outing to Expo EM North a few weekends ago I noticed that on several occasions we had a large number (well 3) K1s lined up in the Stella Gill approach roads. In the interests of variety, and because I like their rather stark lines, I thought it would be good to add an Ivatt 4MT to our pool of available locos.
I have not seen any evidence of 4MTs at South Pelaw, but it is entirely plausible for one of the engines shedded at Darlo, Gateshead, or Teeside would have
The Hownsgill Plate Mill started production during the period that our model of South Pelaw represents, and steel plate was an important traffic that we wanted to include on the model. Fortunately this is quite easy to model using 20 thou plasticard cut to shape, and painted with Humbrol blue grey to represent mill scale.
Its really easy to load as well, no scoring chains being used for regular plate wagons because the plate would be heavy enough to be contained by the wagon sides -- a
We took South Pelaw on the road for the first time in July. It mostly worked well, but a few people observed that while there were empty steel wagons going up the bank to the Consett works, there weren't any loaded wagons coming back down. Our next exhibition is in Newcastle on 10-11 November, and we plan to rectify this deficiency. We already have a good number of Plate wagons, and I have been gradually building some Cambrian kits for Bolster Ds and Boplates, which will feature in a future blog
92061 is now painted, weathered, and ready for action.
An initial outing on South Pelaw was rather unsatisfactory. The pickups were not properly adjusted for the new wheels, so progress was rather intermittent. This problem has now been fixed, and I have also added pickups for the centre wheels, which makes a difference on my test track. During this process, one of the shafts that holds the gears in place within the chassis simply dropped out through the spokes while the locomotive w
Having made the chassis work, then next job was to cut a slot in the footplate for the injectors, comprehensively invalidating the Bachmann guarantee. In his conversion pack, Dave Alexander provides a helpful sheet with the dimensions, which were carefully marked out on the footplate. At the back of the slot, I drilled a line of holes, and then cut the slot using a combination of razor saw for the short edges and a piercing saw with a fine blade to cut through the metal in between the holes. The
92061 has run under its own steam (as it were...) for the first time today. I didn't bother to check that it worked OK as an OO loco before taking it apart, so it is a relief that there aren't any fundamental problems with the chassis.
I drilled out the axles 1 mm using the jig as described in the previous blog entry. A couple of the holes were not central (inevitably perhaps), and looked poor. I fixed this by drilling them out using a larger drill, and filling the still offset hole
It is not long until our depiction of South Pelaw and Stella Gill in EM (http://southpelawem.blogspot.co.uk/) will have its first journey to an exhibition, we're booked to appear at Railex NE at the end of July 2018. A lot of work has gone into making and converting locomotives and rolling stock, and in this blog I plan to document some of the activity that has gone on in darkest South Yorkshire.
One of the main traffics on the Tyne Dock Consett route was of course iron ore, in our p
