Time for the final coach to be converted, I started the NUA a while back but stopped work after completing the first side due to lost parts. Given replacement parts arrived in the post with the NSA sides, it was time to finish it off.

As previously mentioned, this conversion differs from my standard approach in that I have used a Mainline mk1 restaurant as a basis rather than a Bachmann mk1. Purely because I had the model sat in my scrap box as a left over from my 2006 Blue Pullman that I am in the process of selling off.

The first job was to prepare the sides, fitting the window grills and cleaning up the components. I was still missing one door, so this was fabricated from some silhouette cut parts (a back plate with an outline cut of the door for alignment, the front of the door and a window frame. This gave a matching 20thou step between the back plate and the door front which matched the DC Kits parts.

The side was cut away from roof / ends and 1mm or so removed from the ends, checking the fit to ensure that there was a good match. The first step was fitting a door to each side piece, before gluing the guards compartment side into position. As each section dried the next was fitted into position, adding small fillets of plasticard between the top of the side and the roof to reinforce.

There is still a fair bit of work to do to finish the model, requiring a new way of fitting the floor (as the original retaining clips got in the way of the new doors), roof detail, post boxes adding / handrails and the step below the doors. The underframe also needs a lot of work, I am thinking the easiest approach here is going to be cut away all the trussing + any redundant boxes and replace with the kit’s parts