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The Met electric- thoughts on an interior

James Harrison

Entry posted by James Harrison

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With the exterior now largely painted, save for the roof, thoughts are beginning to turn toward how exactly to represent the interior of my Metropolitan electric locomotive.

 

One of them, of course, was exhibited in 1924 with the side panelling removed at the British Empire Exhibition (photo from the London Transport Museum):

 

i000069d.jpg

 

Now what I think this shows is one large block for the motor with lots of wire and ancillary equipment along the sides. Unfortunately we can't replicate this exactly because where this block is, on the model at least, is a strip of whitemetal casting that glues into the resin body as part of the body-chassis fixing.

 

Not that this matters too much, as there are only four tiny windows in the body sides where you would see anything. Which line up with fingerholes through the aforementioned cast strip.

 

My first thought was to build a false floor above the whitemetal strip, and have maybe half of the motor block modelled. Unfortunately this false floor would be right below the level of the windows, if not actually going across them.

 

This complicates matters because it means that the possibility of a one-piece interior model has been thrown out the window. It means now that each piece of the interior has to sit on its own base. The answer to that of course is to model the interior only where it can be seen, and to build it right onto the chassis. So if I line up this casting on the chassis, and then build my interior to line through the holes in it, I end up admittedly with only half an interior but the crucial areas where it will be seen are covered.

 

So I'm thinking now of having two large, roughly detailed 'blocks' sitting in the middle of the chassis to suggest the motor and equipment, and then having bulkheads to suggest the back of the cabs. The whitemetal block would have to be painted black obviously, so as not to stand out in the gloom and to hide the fact that the passage through the loco is blocked at roughy waist-height by a long lump of metal....

 

That just leaves the cabs to sort out, which in photos I have seen look like a cats cradle of wires and equipment. Now obviously not much of that will actually be visible, so it just needs a couple of the more obvious blocks to be modelled. These would be, probably, a couple of cabinets on the cab bulkhead, the driver's chair and controls and a few random 'gubbins' dotted around the cabsides.

 

It could all be built out of offcuts of balsawood and plastic sheet in an afternoon. It looks then like my next modelling session is planned out....

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pete_mcfarlane

I remember peering inside the one in Covent Garden and thinking that the insides were mostly taken up with resistance banks. I wonder if the round items in the photo are the traction motor blowers?

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James Harrison

I'm no electrical engineer, but that sounds plausible.  I'd have thought that the motors themselves would be right down in the bogies with physical gearing to the wheels, to get the power down without loosing too much to friction.  And those drums are right above the bogies... so they'd be (I imagine) just above the motors themselves and ideally placed to vent them. 

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