Whilst painting the inside of the tunnel I got to wondering about Starter signals. Plan A, not that one, the other one, was to put a Section signal at the tunnel entrance but even by model railway standards the Station Limits would be ridiculously short, especially when there's quite a lot of shunting moves that would require blocking back inside the home signal all the time (an even bigger pain in the bum on a single line with tokens going in and out all day). While perusing the Wizard/MSE site I spotted a GWR banner repeater kit. What fun! So, as ever there was no picture, I ordered one. It will look cool and make things a bit more probable. The kit requires a post, so I ordered a round signal post kit as well.

This is banner repeater kit after removng the required parts from the etch. The 'bracket' bit has been folded. You actually get two in the pack. The post kit is essentially a bunch of appropriately size tubes. The instructions are the usual MSE sketch type of thing, great if you have a reasonable skill set but not perhaps for a starter kit. The top right circle (the front of the signal) has to have a strip of brass soldered to it to get the 'depth' of the thing. I used a centre from a till roll (the black thing) to form it, and the soldered in in stages while holding it with the needle file. It worked better than I expected! If, for some reason, I make the other kit I would use a wider strip of brass for this, the one in the kit is a tad narrow when folding up the signal head, requiring some Araldite for a filler. The kit can make a distant or stop repeater, hence the distant arm shown.

Try as I might, I couldn't find a picture of one of these signals - there's a few of later ones but I wanted (bloody mindedness) to make the GWR one. I made the lamp work with a sub mm LED, using a slightly oversize bit of tube from the post kit to take the wires. The rear piece of 'glass' has been given a coat of slightly diluted white before assembly to get the background effect. The instructions say there should be planks to form a platform for the lampman to do his stuff, but there's no dimensions so I basically measured the size of the platform and the handrails from the sketch provided. The handrails are at the bottom of the picture, the tape holds it all while soldering.

And here it is primed.

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