D869

Thanks Pete. You (or any other 2mm member) would be very welcome to come along to a meeting if you find yourself in our neck of the woods - just let us know. At the moment we don't have any more exhibition invites in the calendar in the near future but we would be happy to talk to any exhibition managers. Do you think your 37s will be able to cope with the waves crashing over the sea wall OK?

Thanks - it never ceases to amaze me what photos turn up on the Internet. We have a few photos of the top of the wall taken from the footpath and a distant one that I took from the Scillonian but it is very difficult to get a decent close up of the real wall because someone put the sea in a rather inconvenient place. We've concluded that there is a stong brown hue to the local stonework - this is evident in the sea wall photos and also in photos of some of the stone built houses behind the tracks. The Scalescenes retaining wall looked great when we first did it but we've now decided that it's the wrong colour. Steve - thanks. Actually I find painting the wall quite relaxing... at least on those occasions when it's going well

The sea wall is one of the most prominent scenic features on the layout. It's also pretty long - covering almost all of the 12 foot frontage of the layout. A few weeks prior to the Expo last July it was just a blank piece of plywood and our thoughts turned to make it into something more wall-like. Exactly how to model the sea wall was something that caused us some head-scratching. We already have some retaining walls done with embossed plasticard and the big retaining wall behind the station uses Scale Scenes printed stonework. We felt that the sea wall needed rather more texture than the other walls because it would have been made using bigger blocks of stone which would be battered by the seas causing the joints to be more obvious. The shape of the wall near the station was also rather tricky because it has a couple of fairly tight curves as well as the typical lean that retaining walls have to stop them falling over. The tricky shape (combined with the difficulty of joining so many sheets) rather ruled out the use of embossed sheet as well. We decided instead to try out using DAS modelling clay and embossing the stonework into this. Embossing 12 feet of wall was a pretty scary prospect too - clearly we needed to find a way to mass produce the stone texture rather than manually scribing it. I tried out a few test pieces before attacking the main wall. The first try used manual embossing. This ended up looking like exactly what it was - a bunch of hand-scribed wobbly lines. The next idea was to make some sort of roller to emboss the stonework. The first attempt used a piece of brass tube with fuse wire soldered to the outside in a stone block pattern. It was a real pain to make, even with just two courses of stonework. After embossing the DAS, the result showed some promise but the blocks were too large and I really didn't fancy making another soldered roller with more courses of blocks at half of the spacing that I'd tried for the test piece. A visit to some local model shops turned up some polystyrene tubing. This seemed to offer an easier way to make the roller. I bought the biggest diameter available, which still wasn't very big at 10mm. I was rather worried that a 31mm repeat would not be enough to create convincing stonework. The horizontal joints were added to the roller by wrapping some thin (10 thou by 20 thou) microstrip around it. The microstrip was wrapped around twice to make a double thickness and then fixed in place with solvent. The vertical joints were then filled in using small pieces of 20 thou square microstrip. I did about 4 courses and then took the embryonic roller to the next meeting for trials on the real sea wall. In the meantime John had created the 'lean' of the sea wall using some old Artex. This also gave a nice rough surface to fix the DAS to. Getting a nice even layer of DAS proved a bit tricky but eventually we found some suitable bits and pieces to use as a sort of 'rolling pin'. We rolled out some sheets about 2 or 3mm thick and then cut strips to the right height for the sea wall. The Artex was given a coating of PVA and the DAS sheets were then pressed into place and the joints smoothed over. Finally the roller was tried out on the wall (after lubricating with some water). We were pretty happy with the results so I took the roller home to add the remaining courses to do the full height of the sea wall. I made the lower courses slightly bigger vertically. I also made the lower blocks bigger horizontally by adding just 4 joints per course to the roller instead of 5 for the upper courses. To cut a long story short the remaining length of the sea wall was embossed at the next meeting and we went to the Expo with the wall in that state - and looking very white as the picture below from the Expo shows. Coping I now needed to find a way to add coping stones that would be a reasonable match for the main sea wall. To do this I made a mould about 3 inches in length as a plasticard trough with microstrip inside to emboss the joints. Actually I made two different moulds - one with a flat bottom and one with a shallow 'V' shape to give different styles of coping for different stretches of the wall. It took a while to figure out a way to use the mould without the new coping being pulled off when the mould was removed from the wall. Here is the method we ended up using. The DAS was rolled into a sheet about 2mm thick. This was then cut into strips measured to match the width of the mould. These were put on top of the wall (after brushing with PVA). The mould was then used to emboss the stones. This method didn't have a 100% success rate - sometimes the coping would still come away when the mould was removed, but it was good enough to do the job. The picture below shows all of the tools and test pieces. The thing that looks like a washer is a guide to ensure that the courses stay straight - this was attached with solvent to the end of the roller but it didn't stay attached. I'll glue it back on if I need to use the roller again. Painting One of the advantages of DAS is that it can be painted with watercolours so this is the way we did it. I painted one of the test pieces using some likely colours (ivory black and chinese white to get grey and then raw sienna for a brown hue plus occasionally some light red) to paint individual stones and was quite pleased with the result. The snag was that there was no way that it would be practical to paint each stone on a 12 foot long wall individually, so we had to find a different way. The way we devised was to first paint the wall using a fairly light mix of the colours to represent the colour of the mortar. Once this was dry a darker mix was made up, avoiding using too much water. This was then brushed onto the surface, trying to avoid getting paint in the mortar joints. Each mix covered a fairly small patch and then a new mix was made up so there is inevitably some colour variation creeping in. The picture below shoes the work in progress - on the right I've just painted the mortar colour and on the left I've done the stonework colour. Once this was done I then went over and picked out some individual stones using slightly different colour mixes. I usually looked for stones which hadn't picked up the basic colour very well, so this also fixed up any mistakes from the previous stage. I kept stepping back to check the overall effect and compare with earlier stretches of wall. The next photo shows a finished section of the wall. We really must deal with that white beach. This technique is still quite time consuming - we've spent several sessions on it and it the job is not yet finished , but we're more than half way along.

Hi Julia. The panel lines were scribed with a craft knife - I keep an X-Acto one for this sort of thing because it will take more pressure than the Swann Morton scalpel that I usually use. I also keep a piece of a broken grinding wheel handy because the blade needs frequent sharpening when working on metal. I used the same tool to cut the panels out - this works OK on 5 thou but probably not for anything thicker. The scribing and cutting was done with a glass sheet behind the metal to try to prevent creating an indentation. In practice it does indent very slightly and I can see where the files have touched the back of the panel lines while I was cleaning up the various burrs from the holes and edge cuts. When the panel is laid on the loco roof I can't see any indication that the panel joins are causing the rest of the overlay to stand proud of the surface so at the moment things are looking OK in that regard. Regards, Andy

Thanks Pete - I'm sure this will come in handy one day... but no immediate plans for a 37 here.

I wouldnt worry too much about getting the ballast to look the same - lots of prototype photos show all sorts of variations but many models are too even. Embrace unevenness! The more interesting question might be how to make the variations on the model look right. I wouldn't claim to have got this right myself, but there's no harm in trying.

Thanks Pete. I owe it all to Green Label flux. I hadn't really paid much attention to the classic traction prices because I didn't see any pics of class 22s there that I would particularly want to buy. The pic of D6309 on John Chalcraft's site is another matter - a better picture for a good deal less money. As I said, I'd prefer to do D6309 and if I do than I'll probably order the print to go with it. Just need to find that crucial picture showing the roof...

The roof detail goes on... Choice of Prototype So far I hadn't really done anything that had limited the choice of loco that I could build, but on reaching the roof that was about to change because this is one place where there were lots of variations. The pilot scheme locos D6300-6305 were ruled out because they had a different layout for the louvres and doors on the sides and would need a different body etch. They also had a much simpler roof layout than the production series locos. The roof detail differences appear on the train heating boiler roof (that's the roof at the end of the loco that has the little door high on the side for filling the boiler tanks from water columns). There seem to be two small raised panels on the exhaust side of the loco. Earlier production locos tend to have a grille opening in the upper of these panels. Later locos have the opening on the lower panel. The obvious conclusion would be to say that this variation depends on the boiler type - the books say that D6306-6325 had Clayton boilers and D6326 onwards had Vapor boilers. The snag is that the photos don't quite match this theory - D6326 has the grille opening in the upper panel and the switch to the lower panel happens from D6327 onwards. Dapol seem to have made their opening cover both of the panels. For a while I thought that this was wrong, but inevitably I found a photo of D6311 that shows otherwise… http://www.flickr.co...941510/sizes/o/ Later locos (D6329 onwards?) also have an extra opening on the opposite side of the boiler roof. To complicate matters further many locos had one or both of these openings plated over later in life. Possibly the boilers were isolated although I don't think I can remember seeing any sources that actually say so. I also wanted to avoid having to reproduce the 'eyebrow' vents over the windscreens on some locos. These almost follow a pattern - D6300-D6312 have them D6314 onwards don't. I think that D6313 didn't have them but the only photo I've seen is not 100% clear. The fly in the ointment is D6333 which also has the eyebrow vents. Quite why this happened is a mystery to me. Like I said in another posting, class 22 variations are a minefield. As ever, the story boils down to the fact that you need one or two decent roof photos of your chosen prototype at your chosen period to be sure that you've got it right. So which one did I pick? As I said in Part 1, I wanted a green loco. My initial choice (in spite of eyebrows) was to go for D6309 because there is a very nice 1969 photo of it at St Blazey on John Chalcraft's site at… http://www.railphoto...-RP175.jpg.html I couldn't find any decent roof photos of D6309 so in the end I picked another green loco with no eyebrows which was known to frequent Plymouth and Cornwall - D6323. I have 3 photos of this which show the roof detail clearly. All of them are fairly distant and I don't have a really good close-up photo. One of them is here… http://classictracti.../class-22s.html ... still if a photo of the roof of D6309 in the last few years of its life does materialise, I still might go back to that one... eyebrows and all. The Roof I was originally intending to use the roof overlay provided in the kit but the more I looked at it the less happy I was with it. It correctly shows that the main grille is off-centre but I feel that the grille is too far off the centre line and loo large. I wasn't happy with the position or sizes of some of the other features either. I decided instead to make my own overlay from scratch using 5 thou nickel silver. This is half the thickness of the one in the kit, so should be better in appearance on that score as well. I sketched out the features of the roof and then marked the whole thing out on the nickel silver sheet. After cutting it out and making the exhaust and fan grille holes I formed the curve (around the solder sucker again) tried it on the loco. The fan grille opening was in completely the wrong place because I'd made a mistake in my measurements somewhere along the line. Darn. I scrapped the first roof and went back to the drawing board (or rather CAD) and did a proper drawing of the roof features. I was then able to print this out and try the paper roof on the loco to check that everything was in the right place. Of course I should have done this in the first place. I often spend way too long researching and planning instead of getting on with the job but on this occasion I cut metal in haste and repented at leisure. Once I was happy with the paper roof I marked out the second attempt at the overlay onto the nickel silver and I cut out the overlay. I then offered it up to the main roof and marked the position of the grille opening onto the roof. This was then cut out 1mm oversize to avoid having a 15 thou edge showing and so that I could attach things directly to the underside of the overlay behind the opening. The photos below show the roof overlay in place, the CAD drawing and my failed first attempt. ... plus a comparison between my CAD drawing and the interpretation of the roof in the kit The fan grille is something that has been giving me some cause for thought. The easy option would be to take one of the spare grilles from the kit and attach it behind the opening in the overlay. At the moment, however my plan is a bit more ambitious - I intend to model the four walkway strengthening ribs which are visible in photos and to model the cooling fan beneath these. I don't have anything suitable for the grille itself, so I'm going to try leaving it off and see what the result looks like. I'm intending to glue everything together in this area so that I have the option to change things if it doesn't work out. To make the walkway ribs I blu-tacked a couple of pieces of nickel silver strip to some wood so that they were parallel with a gap of just over 8mm between them. These were then fluxed and tinned. A piece of Eileen's 0.45mm brass wire was then soldered across them and snipped off with wire cutters. I then used a 0.75mm drill to space the next rib from the first, held everything in place (with my fingers), applied flux and quickly soldered each end in place. I managed to successfully repeat this process twice more so that I had four parallel ribs. I think that holding things with fingers helped here because it made me really careful not to dwell too long with the iron… and as a bonus I didn't burn myself either. The excess wire was then trimmed and filed off and the whole thing laid wire-side down onto a file and given a rub to flatten the top surface of the ribs. The photo below shows the finished walkway. The extra panel on the roof of the engine room was the next job - this was marked out on 5 thou sheet and a small hole drilled to start the vent opening. Photos show a distinct 'lip' around this. My original plan was to use one of the small grilles from the kit but I think these are too big. I was thinking about making a lip with 5 amp fuse wire but then a much easier answer presented itself. I started using a tapered reamer to open out the hole and noticed the lip that it was raising on the reverse side. I filed this off and started reaming from the back of the hole instead. Once the hole had reached 2mm I then cleaned up the lip but left some in place. This left a nice subtle lip that I don't think I could have made any other way. Finally I cut out the small extra panel for the boiler roof. I'd picked a loco that had all of the boiler roof openings blanked by the late 60s so I didn't have any holes to worry about. The photo below shows all of the roof detail temporarily in place on the model. I will fix it properly later on when it is less likely to get damaged.

Thanks D826, I have the same book - it is probably my favourite book on the WR diesel hydraulics (but the recent 'Heyday of the Hydraulics' comes pretty close too). If I ever want to build a model of the internal components then this book is definitely the place to look. It also has a very useful high angle photo of D6320 which is the best class 22 roof photo that I've seen. I have to admit that the rate of progress may not be quite what it seems - I started the kit a couple of weeks before I set this blog up, so the first few postings are 'catch up' installments. Things are almost up to date now, so the rate of posting will slow down somewhat. I still owe you all a posting about the roof detail though. I'm also still awaiting the arrival of the chassis from the US, so if that doesn't show up soon then progress may grind to an enforced halt... Plenty of other things in the gloat box though... like the Ultima Hawksworth full brake that arrived in the post today... plus I owe St Ruth a whole bunch of buildings. Regards, Andy

I agree entirely - best to get the faults fixed - especially if they are making you not want to run your railway. We found all sorts of errors on our track when we took the calipers to it. I've really got no idea just how some of them were created, but created they were. It's always painful to re-do stuff like this but I reckon it probably gets more painful the later you leave it because you'll probably have invested even more work that will get damaged or destroyed. Andy

I think so. The drawings that include a plan view agree on this point. Most photos are 3/4 views and don't really answer this question clearly. Here is one a Dave Mitchell photo that is taken from a narrower angle. It's still not 100% clear, but the cantrail line and the bottom of the cab side windows probably show the tapering cab most clearly. http://www.railphotoprints.co.uk/index/detail/6012/6326-Exeter-150571-RPCDM102.jpg.html It's also a reasonable photo for some of the roof detail. I have a couple of better ones but they are not online.

According to his website the 2mm coach stuff is still available to order. I wasn't aware that he did any class 22 parts but I can't see them in his catalogue. http://www.mousa.biz/downloads/made_to_order.html Etched Pixels do some roof grilles for the class 40 and class 50 plus a bunch of body stuff for the Worsley D600 but their only class 22 item seems to be bogie overlays. http://www.etchedpixels.co.uk/index-detail-loco.html If anybody knows of or finds anything then I'd like to know.

Fitting the Cabs To recap from the previous installment... I think that the cab sides need to taper slightly inwards from the doors to the nose, but the kit seems to assume that this doesn't happen. I took some dividers and marked 0.5mm in from the widest part of the nose ends. I filed down to these marks and then continued the filing down to the buffer beam level, checking with a square that the edge was truly vertical. The photo below shows a modified end compared with the original still on the fret. I cleaned out the handrail/location holes with a 0.3mm drill and put some fine steel wire into place. I then added three of the four backing pieces. I had other ideas for number 4 but in the end leaving it off seems to have been the right thing to do. I then filed down the three backing pieces to match the reduced with of the nose end and cleaned up any etching cusps on the top. This is also a good time to file the curve on the top of the nose end. Here is a handy photo as a rough guide to the correct radius. http://www.flickr.co...N02/2366710181/ Next I bent the cab sides inwards slightly, checking against a ruler laid against the main sides to ensure that I bent both by the same amount. Ideally the cab sides should just grip the reduced width nose end. Having done this it was time to solder the nose end into place - after very carefully aligning it with the sides and checking to ensure that no twist is creeping in. Once the nose end was attached and thoroughly checked for position, I soldered on a couple of pieces of plain rail (or 20 by 40 thou strip if you prefer) to reinforce the inside of the corners given that I was about to attack the outside of the joint with a file. The next step was to file the radius on the vertical joint between the nose and cab sides. I haven't quite decided whether this radius is the same as that along the top of the nose or whether it was larger. Mine has roughly the same radius, perhaps a little more. Throughout the previous steps I had been wondering what effect my changes would have on the fit of the cab windscreen surrounds. I reckon that these were intended to fit between the sides but I tried matching mine up to the ends of the sides after first forming them into a shallow (about 2mm) vee shape. Fitting them this way partly compensates for the reduction in width but I was expecting to get some overlap and possibly need to cut a piece out of the lower edge of the frames. In the end the alignment turned out a lot better than I had dared to hope. Given the choice of having a 10 thou edge showing at the front of the cab or ahead of the side windows I would go for the latter anyway (I guess I could have bevelled them if I was really being fussy). At this stage I also formed the cab roof to shape and tried it in place. All was not well because the windscreen surrounds were sitting atop the side sheets of the nose and pushing the roof up resulting in a 0.5mm gap between the roof and the top of the side windows. My solution was to take the windscreen surrounds and carefully file away some of the bottom corner. Measuring using the calipers from inside the windscreen to outside the corner I got 1.5mm before attacking them. I think I reduced this to about half of its previous width. I then tried everything in place again and was amazed to see that the cab roof fitted really well and that the windscreens appeared to 'sit' nice and low on top of the nose - just like the prototype. Next I soldered the windscreen surrounds into position followed by the roof. I also found that the centre pillar of the windscreens was just touching the number 3 backing piece of the nose - so I was glad that I left out number 4 and soldered the two things together where they touched. Of course there is still a gap between most of the windscreen surround and the number 3 backing piece which will need to be filled (another day). I then soldered the cab roof into place. After this there was a step of about 0.5mm down from the main roof to the cab roof which is not prototypical. I will tidy this up with Milliput once the soldering is all done. The big task that I now had was blending the cab roof into the windscreen surrounds. To start with I had a pretty big gap between the two (see photo below) and the roof was overhanging the cab front slightly. I started by filing the front edge of the roof until the overhang was gone. Then I soldered a suitable size of fuse wire on the inside of the joint to fill the worst of the gap. A few extra touches with the soldering iron plus plenty of solder and green label flux eliminated the remaining gaps. It was then just a matter of filing down the roof and various fillers until I achieved what appeared to be the correct transition between the roof and front. It's difficult to describe this in words, but it might help to say that the transition ends at the top of the windscreen surround etching. Basically you need to look at lots of photos and get a feel for the three dimensional curves yourself. The final filing job is probably the trickiest - the top of the nose ends in quite a sharp corner where it joins the sides. This is not prototypical and needs to be blended in, requiring quite a lot of metal to be removed. I used a flat file with a safe edge (i.e. an edge with no teeth) against the windscreen surround to do most of this work, keeping the file parallel to the angle of the windscreen. Blending all of the curves around the edges of the nose together is the final step in the shaping process. The photo below shows this job in progress - the corner on the right has been done but the one on the left has not yet been touched. To finish off, I went back over some of the etched lines with a sharp knife and scraper to remove any surplus solder that had crept in to spoil Mr Doherty's hard work. In the next installment I will start on the roof... where again I've departed from the kit in a pretty major way.

I don't mind the grille frames too much. I think that an overlay would need to be very thin indeed if it were not to look overscale in 2mm. My main issue with the sides relates to the air intakes for the main cooling fan - the kit represents these as mesh grilles whereas photos show them as very closely spaced vertical slats. I can't think of a way to fix this without risking completely messing the whole thing up so I will probably live with it. My cab has a shallow 'V' shaped window surround. I'll be writing this up soon. An interesting photo... but I think that there is something odd going on there. If you compare the lower cab side/valance on the nearest end with the one on the other end, they don't look the same at all. It may be a trick of the light but I think it's more likely that this loco has had a very rough and ready repair to some bodywork damage on the nearest corner. Here's another of Grahame's photos that probably shows the shape of the lower cab sides as NBL intended them to be. http://grahame910.fotopic.net/p62258784.html I'm still not sure whether the slope of the lower sides becomes vertical when it reaches the nose ends. The more photos I look at the less certain I am of the answer (either way). I am sure that if there is any slope left by the time we reach the nose then it's very subtle. My latest theory is that the slope perhaps continues unchanged along the cab sides and is then lost in the three dimensional curves where the sides join the nose so that the edges of the flat part of the nose are truly vertical (maybe!). Anyway whatever the answer it's too late to change the model now. I'd like to get a more certain answer if I ever build one with full yellow ends. Andy

Elvis looking good. I'm curious about the white fluffy stuff though. Is he on cloud 9?

Thanks for the comments folks. Request for a bubble car posting duly noted.

Yes, well I have a habit of building models of things that come out as RTR models a few months later. I have a (mostly) BH Enterpises bubble car. Thankfully I decided to go for the Gloucester RCW class 122 instead of the 121. I have heard murmurings about a Dapol N gauge class 22 but not sure how likely this is. At the end of the day I enjoy building these models and that's the main thing... just a bit of a bummer if most people think it's RTR when they see it. Andy

Yes, Allen's etches are very high quality. I especially like the way that you can see daylight through the louvres - although this will probably stop once the chassis is in place.

In this post I actually start to build the kit... Folding the Body The one job that was worrying me most of all (and probably delaying me starting work) was bending up the single etching that makes the loco sides and roof. Logically this semed like the place to start construction, so at least I would get what seemed to be the worst job over and done with very early in the build. I'd built up some confidence (and tools) with the two wagon kits that I built as 'practice'. In particular I'd found that my solder sucker was a nice convenient diameter for rolling 2mm scale roofs. I'd also figured out a way to create some "poor man's bending bars" without shelling out any extra money. I did this by using two ground steel parallels clamped together using a couple of toolmaker's clamps plus the thick part of an engineer's square to bend the metal over. Parallels and clamps are the kind of stuff that tends to accumulate in my workshop on the grounds that it will come in useful one day. The parallels are something that I made myself on a workshop experience session when I was a student. The clamps were bought at a show many moons ago from Shestos or Squires. The photo below shows these tools (without the loco because I took this photo yesterday just for this posting). It took some thought to figure out the best sequence to do the rolling and folding. In the end I did it in the following order:- Roll the roof around the solder sucker and then gently increase the radius using my fingers until it matched the etched bulkheads. Clamp a body side in the bending bars at cantrail level and then make the cantrail bend by using the thick part of an engineer's square to fold the roof over, lining up by sight against the bulkhead. Do the same for the other side. Clamp the lower part of the body side in the bending bars and make the slight fold needed at the waistline. I then checked the final result by putting in on a glass sheet and manually trued up any twist that had crept in. The folded body looked like this Getting Ready for the Cabs The cabs are rather a long story, but I think they are crucial to the 'look' of the front end of the loco which is by far the most important thing in getting an end result that looks right. As a result, I spent a lot of time and effort trying to figure out the shape of the real thing and get this part of the model as 'right' as I could. This was the first point at which I started to depart from the kit. First of all, I wasn't 100% sure how the kit was intended to be assembled - should the ends fit between the sides or vice-versa? Having measured the bulkheads, nose ends and the backing etches for the nose I concluded that they were all of the same width so the ends were intended to be fitted between the sides. The published drawings all agree that the sides of the loco taper inwards from the cab doors to the nose ends - presumably to give better clearances on tight curves. This was also pretty clear from some of the photos, but it seems that the kit assumes that the sides stay parallel all the way to the nose, making the nose too wide. On the next point I am less certain, but my reading of the photos is that the sides of the nose ends are vertical and not sloped as per the kit. This then begs the question of whether the part of the main sides below the waistline are vertical or sloped inwards. My judgement (based on comparing the alignment of the handrails with those of the sides of the nose) is that there is a slight inwards slope to the lower sides, but less than the slope found on the bulkheads in the kit. If I'm right then there must have been a slight twist in the cab sides to give a smooth transition from the main sides to the nose end. Back to the kit… I don't yet have the chassis that I'm intending to fit but wanted to have some rigidity in the body so decided to fit a couple of bulkheads anyway. These were soldered in level with the ends of the main roof - this is not prototypical but gives maximum rigidity to the cab area during the next operations. I added some 5 thou nickel silver shims between the bottom of each bulkhead and the loco sides to reduce the inwards taper of the main part of the body below the waistline. In the next installment I will cover the construction of the cabs.

Hi Julia, I'm sure that a class 22 will be a breeze for you after the railcar. Spoked wheels would be great but I think I might just get the thing working with disc wheels to start with. Spoked wheels would need to be 7mm diameter or ideally slightly more (3'7) to be correct. I dont think wagon wheels will fit the bill. Maybe some spoked tender wheels might be an option, but I'm not sure if they would be practical to fit to a proprietary chassis. Just about to post Part 2... Andy

Looking good. You certainly know how to pick them! - ever thought of choosing a building with vertical walls and nice right-angled corners? I too have some of the new Mark 1s and very good they are too. Watch out for any on B4 bogies because they have a different axle length from the BR1 bogies.

Thanks Don - yes I did. Quite a piece of engineering. I will be writing some more words about the sea wall in the not too distant future. Hopefully one day I might finish painting the darned thing too.

Andy, I have hopefully got an Atlas MP15DC on the way to me from New Jersey. According to the prototype drawings it has 24'2 bogie centres and a 9' bogie wheelbase. The class 22 is marginally smaller at 23' and 8'6 but then the US model is a marginally smaller scale. Nevertheless it's a bit a of a leap of faith. The usual quoted chassis is the Farish class 20 (in theory 24' and 8'6), so I may go down that road if the MP15 route goes horribly wrong. I've never ordered anything costing more than a couple of quid directly from the US before, so I'm holding my breath and hoping it arrives OK.