having been absorbed in house and garage renovations plus a lot of travelling there's not been much modelling going on, but the odd thing is happening and things at Weston super Mare (S&D terminus) have been crawling forward.  In parallel with trying to resurrect the layout boards that I moved  house with (a blog entry in the imminent future will explain) I have been trying to finish off some stock to run on said resurrected boards to test it. So the trusty early Airfix - (now Dapol) non corridors have been dusted off with the aim of trying to complete them and have a functioning two coach ex LMS local train for those trips to Evercreech junction and Glastonbury via Uphill junction, a diverted Strawberry line to Axbridge and Wells (S&D).  The things left to do were to fix the roofs that were floating and to couple the two coaches together - and lo it has been done! however, I still need to fix the under frame cross trussing which has been damaged on the Lav compo and a torpedo vent has gone missing. Plus if I have the courage, fitting the missing 'First' and 'No smoking' labels to the appropriate windows!!

so here they are, sitting in platform 1 waiting to go somewhere! In the test running I found not everything happy in the running department and there is still some debugging of the compensated bogies (MJT) which I have a real problem in getting flexible enough, getting square and flat (despite using jigs) and problems with clearances between P4 wheels and the underframe of a commercial coach, (even though the Airfix coaches were designed to have wheels swapped out!).

Firstly from the Lav Compo end

the join between the two coaches with Hornby close couplers (just anything to join the two ....) missing vent rather obvious :-(

and lastly a view from the Lav brake end

now for some more test running, shunting them through the layout from arrival platform (s) to the empty carriage sidings to the in-between platform storage road and then into a platform for departure.  I'll let you know how it goes and may even be a video one day ....