Since I'm out of "W"s I decided to finish off the Cornish Riviera kitchen car that I'd been renovating. This was originally bought off ebay some years ago, together with a brass toplight composite and a Centenary brake third. I stripped it and the toplight down using Nitromors which proved highly effective, so much so that anything that had been superglued on fell off (the kitchen car disintegrated into its constituent parts).

I had to take the soldering iron to the toplight to remove excess solder from when it was first built and the previous owner had inserted the compartments the wrong way round. It remains on the workbench awaiting further surgery.

However the kitchen car has now been reglued and painted and is I think now finished. I won the Phoenix kit of the restaurant composite on ebay recently so I might make a start on that sometime soon. So that just leaves the restaurant third to complete the set.

Heres the photos

In a recent auction I also won the BSL kit for the Centenary all third. I tried this out against an old Hornby composite and it fitted the sides and underframe quite well. Encouraged by this I constructed the sides and ends and glued them to a slightly modified Hornby chassis. - Saves having to make one up. The chassis just needed a couple of mm cutting off the subframe above the buffers - I forgot to take some phots of the area - but perhaps next time. I will have to sort out a few errors in the chassis (new battery boxes etc) but I think I'm off to a good start. I think I've mentioned already that I've got the first kitchen car and third diner for the Centenary stock in storage. When I'm back in Leeds in December I'm going to try to dig these out and see if I can do the same with them.

Rovex