Matthew Cousins

All going well. The lubricator pipework looks very fiddly, I take it that the pipes are soldered in after opening out the feed holes in the casting?

A good sound solution to the problem, going well !

Looks like it is well on the mend, the compensation beams have gone in neatly.

The Black buffer shanks were LNER livery and the red were the BR livery so it may be a guide that if the loco had any major works after the LNER livery then it would have changed to BR style. However 60503 had Light or non classified repairs in 1949, so may not have had a full repaint, but when the numberplates were applied, then the bufferbeam numbers would have normally been painted out which might well have included the buffer shanks, so unless you can find a definitive picture it is a difficult one to choose. Most pics that I have seen show black buffer shanks in LNER green/BR numbering, but with number still on bufferbeam.

A good start, it looks like it will make a nice model.

I really like the sunrise photo and thanks for the acknowledgement.

Interesting your point about tarnishing, these look like they have been waiting a dozen years for some action, not realising where you live - Northern Brazil ! I still find it amazing the power of the internet that links people all over the world with similar interests. The well tank looks a bit nose-down, can that be corrected? The Ivatt needs some form of compensation? Although lots of people tell me that 7mm rigid chassis are OK, I find that they are the only ones that give me problems, particularly with my outdoor layout.

Well done, looking good, but I don't think that I would have had the heart to put the stovepipe chimney on such a nice little engine, a flared one was still used with the other details, but then some folk do like stovepipe chimneys!

Great detail work as usual Jon, I should have kept the Heljan 0 gauge Brush 4 for you to work over!

Very nice work, your comment about the rear toolbox is correct - it stays shut by the weight of the heavy wooden lid on a full width leather hinge (what you have called a weather strip). With regard to lampiron fittings, any reference photos that I have (including some rarely published) tantalisingly don't show this fixing, so they might not have even been fitted? The two considerations I think would be practical, can you get the lamp on with the overhang lip of the bunker and do they foul the toolbox lid? I think that the vacuum ejector pipe may be carried closer to the boiler, although on te photos that I have it varies at different stages of its life and in Southern days there are two pipes into the cab - but at the earlier stage it is carried tight to the smokebox and then straight back. Will you be fitting the pulley system on top of the cab roof? This seems to have arrived with the Drummond boiler which started with a flared chimney but got changed to a stovepipe by early Southern days. The detail on this engine seems to be ever changing through its life.

Nice work with the lamp irons, I look forward to progress on this alternative Terrier, I did a profile of this in LSWR livery. It was one of my early efforts, so not sure if I got all this detail. I think that companies tried to make sure that their lamps didn't fit other companies ones, so they didn't get nicked.

I remember a return to Eastbourne in the winter of 1977 with a 4 vep crawling along by Berwick in the dark sending electric arc flashes out across the snowy fields, as the driver tried to keep the train moving with a frozen third rail. Your story brought that memory back to me, well done!

I've been contemplating this livery instead of the BR express blue on my 0 gauge A4 project, if I can't get that blue right might well return to this as it's looking pretty good.

You could make a patch repaint part of your weathering process, Many sheds undertook patch repainting and when weathered down it will add that bit of extra interest !

I seem to have a myriad of test pieces and am not really confident of any them and having looked at several models in this colour there does not seem to be a consensus on the colour. Even when they painted the full-size King, which I think looks superb, there is even criticism of that, with some saying that there is a paler blue used by the Western region which may or may not be true! Anyway I shall finish it to what I think looks nice, if not absolutely right! The problem will be that any photo, even digital, seems to have colour rendition problems, so when I take pics for this blog, I shall do them in daylight and take whatever flak gets thrown at me!

I have assembled the loco and tender briefly to check heights etc. and to see the overall impression in primer. My intention is for this to be in BR express loco Blue, which is enjoying a bit of popularity of late and to weather it a bit to try and get an authentic look. The problem is that The correct blue seems to be a real issue at present and Precision paints have withdrawn their colour, stating that it was not popular. Currently I am testing out a colour called Roundel Blue - which I take it is the RAF marking colour and to overspray with a Ford colour and then weather it all... It will be interesting to see how this all works out!

As a kid I never needed a nightlight as a sodium light blazed through my window, leaves me somewhat nostalgic, as where I am now is down a pitch black country lane, did think of putting up an old gas light, until I worked out the cost!

I agree with the need to tone the paintwork down with a bit of weathering. This BR blue seems to have more interpretations than almost any other colour as the colour was not very well picked up by some colour films at the time. The Thompson rebuild of Great Northern seems to hold a strange fascination for a lot of people, including me and I've often thought of doing a model of it in 0 gauge, but instead I've asked a friend of mine to build a Peppercorn A1 in BR blue instead. Well done on a really good effort though!

I am starting this blog at somewhat of a halfway stage to give a warning to anyone starting to mess about with a Bachmann A3 chassis! Having had a cast white metal A4 body lying around for some time I came up with a novel idea to get this on a chassis from a Bachmann A3 that I picked up for £365, whilst saving the body and tender of the A3 to form the basis of a P1 2-8-2 (Gresleys freight Mikado version of the A1/A3 pacifics) Later on I shall show progress on both these engines where for an outlay of around £700 I can make both a P1 2-8-2 and an A4 4-6-2, but for this posting I shall pass on my experiences with the A3 chassis for the A4. Taking the basic Bachmann A3 chassis, I thought that I could improve the valve gear and replace the coupling rods and eccentric etc. Having taken the rods off I found that I couldn't re-attach the pins as it was not possible to get the pins relocated on the wheels without taking the force fit wheels off their axles and ruining the quartering and probably ending up with wobbly loose wheels. So now what? I had a set of Slaters driving wheels acquired with some issues of the 'Build the Flying Scotsman' partwork ( I wonder how many odd sets of these partworks are still lying about!) and looking at the axles on the Bachmann A3 thought that it would be a simple job to replace the wheels - HOW WRONG I WAS !! The nicely sprung axleboxes that I thought had an axle approximating to a Slaters axle passing thorough them had in fact got a reduced diameter axle at the ends to which not only the wheels a force fitted but also concealed in that nice sprung axlebox was a ball bearing race! - I can hear comments of 'he should have checked this first...more money than sense...etc etc'. As can be seen from the photos I was now in a real mess, nothing of the Slaters axles fits this lot! So I felt the only way to rescue this was to fit plain bearings into the axleboxes by boring out the axle hole and aralditing in the plain bearings - I am a terrible bodger but managed to achieve an acceptable result, only to find out that some company makes roller bearings that fit Slaters axles I think. The motor/gearbox was much more of a problem as I couldn't force off the ball race and so had to saw this axle up to release the gear cog to put on the Slaters axle and had to get a friend to turn up a spacer to accommodate the plain bearing in the gearbox otherwise it would have meant throwing the whole motor/gearbox away and buying my preferred ABC items, but I was determined to save a bit of money! So please look at the photos attached and probably the best advice is NOT to touch the wheels of these early Bachmann A3's at all but just tidy up the radius link and die block on the valve gear some other way!! Having said that I am pleased with the improvement to the appearance of the wheels and I can now fit proper valvegear and the quartering will never be a problem!

Hi Jon, sorry to see you in such a pickle, I'm not keen on precision paints either and found Railmatch fine, definitely no gloss painting on models tho' a satin finish is as shiny as it should get I feel. Good luck with stripping, but be prepared to lose the lot paintwise, tho the primer may hang on at least partially. Its a bit like riding a bike - if you fall off, don't delay just get back on quick, so get stuck in and get the paint off pronto, before it hardens any more!

A superb scene, you could almost walk into it!

Brave man! Glad that you have discovered the wonderful world of Pre-group railways, whilst I have mostly LNER from 1935 to 53 I have always kept some pre-group LBSC locos as their style and livery are beautiful - but in 0 gauge not N. It will be very interesting to see how you get on. I have seen an N gauge RTR LBSC terrier, and was very impressed with that and took a pic of it sitting on the tank of my 0 gauge terrier, which I should post in my gallery. Anyway good luck and enjoy Pre-gouping, but perhaps as a sideline build a small 0 gauge model of a Terrier, P or other dinky engine and I think that you will have a lot of fun with making it.

Now that engine type certainly should have been built, but wasn't it Riddles that stopped it and suggested a development of his WD 2-10-0? If we had this on the Bluebell it would not be sitting about, but would be a popular engine, as it is the 9F suffers from rear driver flange wear due to having to spend half its time going backwards. Also the ashpan is difficult to clear properly and clogs up fast and this design would have been better. One of the great might have beens, still I hope that someone will build a P2, but this Standard would be almost as interesting!

Great work Jon, are you going to keep this unpainted for the Burgess Hill show so that you can show what has been added? I look forward to seeing the models.