Gresley Buffet Cars in the 70s

[Halvarras]

A while back I mentioned that I had purchased an Ian Kirk Gresley Buffet Car kit over 40 years ago and with the availability of new images on here showing the roof detail it might yet make it to the top of my To Do List. Thing is, a catering vehicle wasn't exactly a pressing requirement for my BLT layout, I was simply optimistic that one day it would come into its own. That still remains to be seen but I just wanted a model of the famous W9135E I saw so often at Reading in the early 1970s. Oh yes, and once at Plymouth behind D1010 I think - I'll have to dig out the photo.......However, look at this - it made it to the top at last! I started working on it 4 weeks ago today and as at last night it had reached the painting stage, something I never thought would ever happen! But I did take some shortcuts.......

I have a few resprayed Tri-ang Hornby Mark 1 coaches and the intention was always to run the Gresley with these - the degree of window recessing is about the same so I reckoned it would look right at home. Because these models all run on 12mm Hornby wheels for ride height reasons, the Gresley has been built to match (in any case a test fit with 14mm wheels indicated a limitation on bogie swing as the solebars are quite thick). At some point in the dim and distant past I picked up a pair of Bachmann Thompson coach bogies, when they still had large moulded-on couplings, 14mm plastic wheels and cost £2 a pair (those were the days.....), I also had a pair of old Tri-ang DMU brake cylinder mouldings, both of which avoided having to construct the fiddly items included with the kit - I've strived for neatness but not 100% prototype fidelity, after all it'll be running with T-H Mark 1s....... The use of 12mm wheels dropped the coupling height by 1mm so the moulded-on couplings were removed and Dapol items screwed on top of the stems, which allowed a better coupling distance setting.

The kit's instructions suggested gluing the roof on........oh no, I can accept this for goods vans with nothing inside to break loose, but absolutely not for a passenger vehicle with separate details, that's asking for trouble! Plan A was, when separating the sides from the full-length sprue along the top, retain a lip to engage with grooves carved into each side of the roof so the latter could be fitted Tri-ang style. It was necessary to widen the contact area with strips of 60thou plasticard glued down the inside edges of the roof and filed flat, however it proved impossible to accurately carve two grooves precisely 32.5mm apart down the full length of the roof. Time for Plan B then, but first the now redundant lips had to be carved/filed away without breaking the tops of the window frames........phew, that was nerve-wracking! Plan B involved installing 4 cross-members in the roof, securely located in gaps cut into the 60thou strips, which project down about 1.5mm and are aligned with window partitions to keep the bodysides straight, as the 'window' side was bowing in slightly. This worked very well; although this kit may appear rather crude in places - and locating lugs etc are not universal - the main parts are impressively accurate which really helped.

 

First job, the all-important BR side mod. After removing all unwanted vertical ribbing I plugged all unwanted windows with 40thou glued in flush with the outer surface, faced the latter areas with 5thou then added the ribbing. Also visible here are the external vacuum brake pipe and propane gas cylinder cupboards (?) formed from laminated plasticard. One thing I noticed while studying photos of these vehicles is that the lower-numbered ones (E911xE) have underframes the other way around, so the pipe is on the other side and the cupboards and battery boxes swap sides too. The things you notice while researching a subject......
One aspect I'm not 100% happy with are the mountings for the roof boards - in my rush to get on with it I broke my own rule about checking the positioning of a manufacturer's moulded detail before using it as a reference to position more detail. I had 'correctly' attached the mountings' horizontal strips about halfway between the guttering and curved rainstrip but having finished the job I realised that the rainstrips arch too high up, meaning my mountings are also now higher and more vertically extended than they should be. It was tricky to plot and fix these on the curved roof sides so I'll probably live with it now.

 

The other less interesting side, so we'll talk about the roof! The details for W9135E were discerned from a photocopy of a picture I'd retained from Model Rail magazine, May 2005, showing it entering Plymouth behind a Peak. It was just elevated enough to enable a fairly educated guess at which of the various vents 9135 sported, with reference to other Gresley Buffet Cars (it really does appear that no two were the same up top) and photos/drawings of catering vehicle vents in the Parkin book on Mark 1 stock. The two black raised vents and single torpedo type are kit parts, the middle black vent has a Hornby plastic buffer head in a ring cut from a Plastruct tube and filed out as far as I dared to represent the shielded round type - luckily 9135 only appeared to have one of these. The rectangular vents were 5x4mm rectangles of 30thou with 5x3mm 10thou rectangles on top, produced as a single strip, cut to length and cut/filed to shape......bit hard to describe those, but page 224 of the Parkin book provided guidance.

 

The underside showing the Bachmann bogies, 3 pieces of lead sheet weight and the two old Tri-ang brake cylinder/V-hanger mouldings (my using-up of old bits n pieces I've had for decades goes on!) - I cannot be certain whether these are on the right sides but it all looks the part in side view. The 'clipped' buffers are I believe MTK whitemetal left-overs from a blue/grey Hawksworth SK I built years ago (an interesting link between two 'Big Four' designs which both achieved BR corporate colours!) - they are shorter than the turned brass ones supplied but maybe not quite short enough........Ah, you've noticed the central(ish) brass screw - see below!

 

The inside of the roof showing the four carefully-positioned locating ribs (so they don't show through the windows) and the very Tri-ang method of securing the roof in place - yes, that brass threaded boss securely embedded and superglued into the roof is a top pivot from a Tri-ang diesel motor bogie and a standard Tri-ang coach roof bolt screws into it a treat - sometimes things just work out! At one stage I had expected to have had to use 3 or 4 screws to attach the interior units to the floor and two bolts to fix the roof, but a slight curve to the roof moulding meant just the one was necessary to pull it down in the middle, which then holds the interior in position without further fixings, and the cross ribs and end lugs stop it moving around and keep it all straight. The bogies and brake cylinders weren't the only dodge, I couldn't face sawing/filing the supplied seating strip into 24 individual chairs so I dug out some old Lima Class 117 DMU seat units conveniently with 2+1 seating, cut the required 5 units, filed these to suit the Gresley window spacing and 'butt-welded' them together. The 20thou plasticard sides strengthened the assembly and provided a mounting for the scratchbuilt tables (with plastic rod legs) to create this removable 'tub'. On reflection I may have missed a trick in not running a razor saw most of the way down the middle of the twin seats to make them look more like the individual chairs of the real thing, but it would probably have been all but invisible from the outside anyway. The right side of the buffet area uses the walls from the kit, also the counter (faced on top with 10thou - quicker than painting it white several times!) and 'ceiling', which wasn't strictly necessary but it was there, so...... Everything else is plasticard. I know that this area is not strictly accurate but it serves my purpose (as well as sandwiches, teas, coffees and soft dri...........ah no, sorry, momentarily lost the plot there 🤪!) The instructions required all of this to be built in situ inside the shell.......before gluing the roof on! I don't think so! Having done just this one Gresley the idea of constructing an entire rake would see me running for the hills! 

 

So it'll now join my BR Inspection saloon in my long paint queue, which I intend to tackle this year (that's the plan anyway.....🤔)

 

Incredible isn't it - I've now had the thing 516 months and it's taken just the one to build it! There's a moral there somewhere.......

 

[Halvarras]

D1010 Western Campaigner not long out of the Laira Paint Shop, at Plymouth North Road with Gresley Buffet Car W9135E, on 16th May 1975. Pity I didn't take a good shot of the buffet car while I had the chance.....however 47087 'Cyclops' was about to get in the way!

[Halvarras]

It has taken me nearly 48 years to notice that the vehicle between 1010 and the Gresley has central branding - with 7 windows and no middle doors I reckon this says "Restaurant" and is either W4, W5 or W6, according to my 1976 RCTS Coaching Stock book.

 

Question is, how common was it for mere Buffet Cars to run paired with RUO (Restaurant Unclassified) vehicles? Perhaps the catering staff were expecting to be extra busy that day and requested additional seating capacity for the sandwich-munchers.....🤭!

[acourtrail]

On 02/01/2010 at 10:26, ianfolland said:

A picture of blue/grey 9124 in preservation at Loughborough, February 1982. Unfortunately I didn't make a note of the identity of the coach on the right.

 

Ian

That one was VERY lucky to make it into the 1950s, never mind blue & grey and later preservation.  According to the MoT report into the Penmanshiel Tunnel train fire in 1949 - 9124 (the report has conflicting numbers for the restaurant car - a floorplan diagram states it as 9184, but 9124 is quoted in the written part of the report at least twice) was the 11th coach it the train, and right next to the two Thompson coaches that were burned out.  The fire did spread into the seating end of 9124, but it was uncoupled from the burning coaches, and the fire in 9124 was put out before the coach was too badly damaged.