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Honest Tom's Yard - Bashing Hornby's Generic Coaches


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Having been following the thread on Hornby’s steampunk range, I thought I’d dip my toe in the genre with a spare 0-4-0 chassis, some styrene and whatever I could find lying around. I call this engine Steampunk Willie.

 

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It's a long way from finished, but I was surprised by how easy it is to work with styrene sheet. In many ways, this is a test bed for future scratchbuilding. The basic shape is very simple, but it's going to be covered in various bits and pieces to make it look a little more interesting and Emett-esque.

Edited by HonestTom
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Steampunk Willie has enjoyed some progress this evening. The cab interior, such as it is, and the tender are still to do.

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I'm a fan of Chris Walas' large scale modelling, and in particular the way he manages to create such wonderful models using basic household bits and pieces. To that end, the components of Steampunk Willie mostly came from the pound shop and junk I had lying around. Aside from the Hornby chassis and the styrene, the components were:

 

Smokebox - the top of a glue stick

Funnel - part of a mechanical pencil tube

Chimney crown - birthday candle holder

Pipes - paper clips

Dome - one of those googly eyes

Weight - washers from an assorted pack

Safety valve cover - push pin, minus the pin

Rivets - decorative jewel stickers

 

There's still a lot more to add, of course. Steampunk Willie is very much supposed to be a thrown-together loco. The locomotive was built by CME and part-time plumber Dai Pritchard, whose engineering philosophy is that "it's mostly plumbing when you get down to it."

Edited by HonestTom
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  • 3 weeks later...

The railway's works at Aberfanana have been mightily busy, what with the dominoes championship coming up and all, but they've finally got around to some actual locomotive building. Steampunk Willie has a tender now.

 

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There's a fair bit of detail still to add (you may have noticed there's no water tank - I have a cunning plan for that). I was originally going to make the tender a more conventional shape, but when I inserted the original back of the tender between the sides it went in at an angle, and I thought it was a pretty cool look - kind of Emett-esque.

Edited by HonestTom
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I am pleased to announce that for the second year in a row, the Seacastle Domino Championships have passed with no fatalities and we expect Mr Worboys to be as right as rain in a week or so. Although our boys from the works came third, they were nevertheless invigorated into completing Steampunk Willie!

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Something is missing... but what?

 

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Success!

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  • 2 weeks later...
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  • 4 weeks later...

Here's my latest project. It's just a silly thing. I have some rolling stock from that Toy Story 3 set that Hornby did, which is absolutely useless for anything serious, so I thought I'd use them for something entirely fantastical. I'm a fan of H P Lovecraft's weird fiction, and I thought I'd work this boxcar over to represent a wagon from that universe. I'm planning to follow up with the caboose, the combine and a second boxcar (pictured for comparison). I might look into acquiring the locomotive and scratchbuilding a tender, but I don't want to go too nuts.

 

 

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Edited by HonestTom
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I hadn't - thanks for pointing it out! That's some seriously impressive modelling.

 

Hmm, maybe I should think of a different name for my company, but Miskatonic is such a satisfying word to say (plus it instantly tells the viewer that this is a Lovecraft model). Miskatonic Narrow Gauge Railroad perhaps?

Edited by HonestTom
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  • 2 months later...
  • RMweb Gold

 

Top tarp tip!

 

I just copied and pasted the YT URL from the URL bar in chrome and it auto-embedded.

 

Also - don't remember if I thanked you properly but your tip about 'trimits' was great, used it on 2 locos so far :) 

Edited by Corbs
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  • 1 year later...

Oh hey, this thread exists. Well, I've been working on some Hornby generic coaches. I thought I'd see if I could make them look less Stroudley-esque. In the long run, I want to make a set of GER-style coaches, but that's quite an involved conversion. So to begin with, I thought I'd try messing around with an LSWR brake coach. Here was the starting point. My phone really doesn't like focusing on the black ends of these coaches, so apologies for that.

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The "conversion" consisted of altering the windows, which was an easy job. I used styrene strip to give the impression of the top bar of a window frame. Happily, the width of the windows is almost exactly 5mm, which made measuring easier. I glued it in place with poly cement. As you can see in the second photo below, I touched the lower edge of the bar in black, as I figured this would be basically impossible to paint once it was in place.

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The final stage was painting. Fortunately, the ends of these coaches being black made things easier. The ends are flush glazed, which appears to have been achieved by making the whole thing out of clear plastic and printing the livery on to it. Therefore, I painted the inner windows black, along with the bars themselves and the "glass" above them. Here's the result in cruel close-up, next to somewhat dusty coach with unmodified windows:

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And here it is with another coach atop a viaduct:

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I guess I should get an engine to haul them...

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  • HonestTom changed the title to Honest Tom's Yard - Bashing Hornby's Generic Coaches
1 hour ago, Michael Hodgson said:

... and redo the foliage in the viaduct's backscene closer to scale !    But there's always too many jobs to get round to all of them.

I seem to recall putting up that wallpaper somewhere myself.

That wallpaper was the choice of a former flatmate. The guy had a bit of a drinking problem. Last I heard, he'd changed his name and the bailiffs were after him. There are some interesting people in this world. I'm sure his taste in wallpaper was unrelated though.

Edited by HonestTom
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Well, that was quick.


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A bargain-priced Oxford Radial showed up just when I needed one. I know it’s not as super-detailed as the Hornby one, but since the coaches are a compromise, I’m not losing sleep over it.

Edited by HonestTom
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  • 2 years later...

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