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About this blog

Modelling in S7, OF, S132, S scale...and a bit of 4mm too.....

Entries in this blog

GWR conflat & container

Something I recently dredged out from one of the containers on the drive - an ex-GW H7 conflat wagon and container.     Originally built five or six years ago, this was going to be in the 1930s GW livery, but the commission ground to a halt when my client changed period to late Edwardian, so back it went unpainted into the box, until picked up by someone else for an early 1950s setting.   It's built almost as designed with the exception of replacement GW-style screw couplings from Laurie
Buckjumper

Buckjumper

10

Ivatt 2MT

Last year, in the antediluvian period, I was sent this RTR Finescale Brass Ivatt 2MT for weathering and, well, you know, splish, splash, splosh, Noah, and all that, so it went into storage while we dried out and rebuilt. Fortunately my client is a very patient chap, but here she is, out of storage and is now on the first part of a long journey down under to Oz where she'll work out her life on a little twig of an Essex branchline.     The model came to me painted and lined, but the new owne
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Buckjumper

9

Great Eastern R24 Class Shunter (1)

Off we go at a tangent. Get used to it...   One of the locos on the bench which is a whisker from completion is a Great Eastern shunting engine of the R24 class (LNER J67 in the low tongue). This is based on one of the Connoisseur J67 kits (now discontinued) with quite a bit of scratchbuilding and a fair number of alterations to backdate it to 1912 condition. This was started a couple of years ago, just before an enforced hiatus from modelling, and I've only recently picked it up again.   Be
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Buckjumper

9

LNER (ex-GER) 6-wheel Brake Third

Companion to the six wheeled composite of the previous entry is this D&S brake 3rd which as you can see, was built and painted to a lovely standard by Danny Pinnock many years ago, but in the interim has gained some less than appropriate weathering:     I realigned some errant transfers, then again I tweaked the chocolate brown base to a rich chestnut with tinted mist coats, weathered it more appropriately as described in the last entry, and finally re-glazed the carriage with 0.13mm gl
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5

LNER (ex-GER) 6-wheel composite

Well it's been a very long time - in fact 223 days since the flood, but there is at long last a definite light at the end of the tunnel, even if it's still a way off. Eventually ten rooms were severely affected either directly or by secondary damage, and taken back to brick and concrete. Where there were timber frames they were removed and ceilings propped up, and my workshop was razed to the ground. It took until the end of July to dry the house out, but we've got one room completed with two mo
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Classic Queen Mary

When I handed the painted EWS Queen Mary brake van back to Jim McGeown of Connoisseur Models for his exhibition stand last spring he said, 'Thanks very much old chap, would you like to do one in Southern livery too?'   I said 'Yes please Jim, delighted to, old bean,' and skipped away with another heavy box of brass and whitemetal.     When I got home I opened it and found the model constructed to Jim's usual high standard; free from excess solder blobs and squeaky clean. Nevertheless it n
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10

A gloomy pill

Another from last year's archive, today's positively sil blog entry has an appropriate soundtrack, so and enjoy (YouTube link).    Very much contemporaneous, I reckon you needed to have a sunny disposish to remain sane as a goods guard in the gloomy Pill Box brake vans. Not sure if the vermilion ends were an absolutely most redic safety feature or an attempt to cheer up the poor chap incarcerated inside.   The Parkside kit is as well designed as other kits from the stable, most of the
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That's some gestation; SR van no.2

OK, so I said I'd post this after the weekend and nine months passed instead. It's the result of a concatenation of events including trying to move house, hospital wards (not me) and culminating in being flooded out in the winter storms. We're still reeling from the last one which wiped out my workshop and everything in it as well as half the ground floor of the house.   Fortunately the ground floor is on two levels, and at its worst the water was within a gnats of flooding there too. Main thi
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10

Grotbags - a PLV also available in green.

Here is a broken record of the construction of a Slater's Southern PLV. Or is it a PMV? I was asked to paint it malachite, and although I don't want to start a bun fight, I'm sure it looked fine to whomever was drinking Elixir Végétal de la Grande-Chartreuse at Southern HQ at the time   The Slater's kit is rather lovely, and the parts fit together exceptionally well. The instructions cover an awful lot of variations, some of which aren't catered for in the kit, so I went through it with a mal
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7

A little Southern for the weekend?

I haven't built a Parkside kit for a while so knocking out a couple of Southern 12T covered vans to diagram 1428 was a nice change. In fact, to build something 'out of the box' without having to worry about springing or compensation or replacing the running gear with etched bits and pieces was a bit of a tonic. A gin & tonic. Much as I love to super-detail stuff, sometimes the big kid in me just wants to stick a plastic kit together and slap some paint on. What a bonus to be paid to do just
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EWS Queen Mary brake van

It's been a very busy few months in modelling and non-modelling terms, but now as things are calming down a little I've got time to download and sort through some of the photos stored on my camera from the various building and painting commissions.   Jim McGeown of Connoisseur Models asked if I’d decorate a Queen Mary brake van he'd built in the EWS livery as a counterpoint to the predominantly 1940s/50s stock he already has on display on his exhibition stand.     Following the brief, in
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8

Ex-GER J65 no.8211

J65 no 8211 was the penultimate survivor of twenty locos. Built as GER no.155 in 1889, it spent much of its life alongside several others of the class working the Blackwall line from Fenchurch Street (hence the class nickname 'Blackwall Tanks') until rusticated by the LNER in the late 30s. It then spent the rest of its life vacillating between Ipswich and Norwich, with spells at Cambridge, Colchester, Yarmouth and Yarmouth Beach until withdrawn in November 1953. For almost all of its life it r
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5

Ex-GER J15 (2)

And here she is. Had a slight misfortune with a drop of oil on the boiler 12 hours before delivery which was carefully removed with IPA soaked cotton buds. Fortunately no weathering was displaced, but oil did seep through the first couple of extra coats of weathering which meant more IPA...still, I won out in the end and delivered on time.     65389 was one of the last steam-brake only J15s and spent most of its life pottering around the East Suffolk byways. Dick Riley caught with a series
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Ex-GER J15

One of four (yes, four) Great Eastern S23 tenders passing through the Works. This is tender No.7886 of 1890 and will be coupled up to a steam-braked J15 by the end of the week once the drybrushing and final weathering is completed.     The basis is the tender from the Connoisseur kit, but that only caters for the post-1893 tenders with sausage-shaped lightening holes in the frames. Earlier tenders had the D-shaped slots illustrated, so I had new frames drawn up in TurboCad and etched.   I
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4

Great Eastern R24 Class Shunter (2)

...and what a difference!     A horribly cruel close-up, and for some reason the artificial lighting has cast a strange almost unreal pall over the photo.   A little more weathering around the chassis and a final test of the electrics and it'll be off to a new home.
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Buckjumper

1

Basilica Fields

I have an external blog - a journal, if you will - in which I have been recording the research and construction of a long-term modelling project in ScaleSeven which will cover the Metropolitan Railway’s Inner Circle Extension, the Extended Widened Lines, and the East London Railway Extension as well as the Great Eastern lines out of Liverpool Street. Such a large area could not possibly be replicated in it’s entirety, so it is proposed to concentrate on the underground lines just east of the ju
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Great Central Dia.6 3-plank dropside (3).

For ease of priming, the wheels are temporarily put back onto their axles which are masked off. I don't want primer or paint on the axles at this stage as they've yet to be fitted to the inside bearings.   Any flash on the plastic spokes has been pared away with a Swan Morton blade, files and wet & dry paper - whatever is required. Of course the camera picks up no end of evils which the Mk.1 eyeball overlooks...   If, as in this case, the final colour of the wheels is black, then they ar
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4

Great Central Dia.6 3-plank dropside (2).

...24 hours later the Araldite is fully cured.     Compensation Units   With the axle guards securely in place, my attention now turned to the compensation units. A number of types are available, but I find the type with inside bearings supplied by WEP are unobtrusive and go together with a minimum of fuss; simply fold up and a couple of dabs with a hot iron is enough for the solder to work its way into the folds by capillary action. A small engineer's square ensures everything is fixed
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4

Highland fish.

The Highland Railway's Diagram 12 fish truck was the earliest of three types of open wagon for transporting fish in passenger-rated trains. There seems to be some uncertainty as to the exact livery - some speculate it was painted in goods red, others in passenger green - of course it's possible that they appeared in both if the type was moved from the wagon register to the NPCS register (or whatever it was that the Highland used to differentiate stock).     I was impressed with Pete Armstro
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5

Great Central Dia.6 3-plank dropside (1).

Abridged History   Several thousand 16 feet long (over headstocks), 3-plank dropside wagons with 9' 6" wheelbase were designed and built by the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway through the 1890s. Over the years detail differences emerged such as axleboxes, lubrication, journal size, and this in turn affected the load capacity which ranged from 8 to 10 tons. Wagons to essentially the same design but with further detail differences were built for the Cheshire Lines Committee, but
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2

View of the Yard

A quick, and very rough sketch to show the levels. That it looks like part of Ricey's Cornfield Street is no accident - it fits the bill perfectly, so there's no need to reinvent the wheel.   We're looking south. In the foreground I've added the an impression of the far side of the brick lined cutting for the Metropolitan Lines (stage 3 of this segment) and the position of the future road bridge over it on the right hand side. On the viaduct at the back will be the quadruple tracks of the Gr
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8

GW MICAs - an overview.

The recent completion of a commissioned X2 MICA B in post-1904 livery prompted this entry, and the accompanying photographs illustrate that model.     Located as it is between the dock and Smithfield market, meat traffic will play a significant part of goods traffic passing through the subterranean levels of Basilica Fields, with the GWR shouldering the greatest load. If, like me, you grew up unsullied by Great Western telegraph code nomenclature, and therefore completely in the dark about
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12

GW Dia.03 5-plank open - more photos,

Following up an earlier entry, here are some more photos. All the info on the model can be found in the original post, and as promised, a photo of the interior with the sheet folded - but not as per regulations!    
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1

GW goods wagons part 2; The AA7 ‘Toad’ brake vans.

Twelve examples of the Great Western’s 13 ton AA7 brake vans were built between 1897 and 1898 to Lot 206 for working the company’s trains from Acton over the Metropolitan and (for a short stretch between Farringdon Street and Aldersgate Street) the Widened Lines to Smithfield – they were numbered in the series 56985-96. Essentially they were a short version of the AA3 vans with a 9ft wheelbase, measuring 16ft over headstocks with a proportionally smaller verandah than the larger vans.  
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