On Swindon 123s workbench.

[Swindon 123]

On going with the 2d-BFK was a review of the catering vehicles required. To allow for the different catering requirements on the ECML in the mid 70's there where 3 main types used. Restaurant -Buffets in the 16XX number series, usually paired with Restaurant -Unclassed in the 19XX series. Both of these could be covered with existing models. The third vehicle was a Kitchen-Buffet in the 15XX series which where usually paired with a Restaurant Unclassified Open in the 10XX series. (Specifically the TSO bodystyle with loose seats). I had originally had an old MTK kit started years ago fixed to an ex Mainline buffet chassis in the "Started but never finished" box and intended to use this, but on closer inspection I decided it would not come upto scratch with the newer stuff, so I decided on the scratchbuild/conversion approach. With a spare Bachmann Restaurant in raspberry ripple livery to hand the challange was on.

A quick check of drawings I decided a rebuild of the Bachmann coach was on, with only a couple of the window inserts requiring modification the project was on. The first task was to fill in and blank off the existing detail on the coach sides. The following photo's should help, (I hope), explain.

The doner coach. (The one used was in raspberry ripple livery)

 

First step filling in all the windows.

 

With the windows filled in a couple of coats of Halfords primer to clear up any blemishes.

 

Marking out the new windows and doors ready for cutting out.

 

Windows cut out and doors scribed. This took longer than envisaged as I had a lot of trouble sticking the window fill pieces to the Bachmann sides and one or two fell out whilst cutting out the windows. Much frustration!!

 

Door hinges, ventilation grills and some of the handrails added. Door handles and grabhandles will be added after painting.

Attention has now transfered to the roof and underframe.

 

Paul J.

[Swindon 123]

Slow progress on the Kitchen Buffet, mainly due to a lack of good photo's of the roof and underframe. A trawl through the web and contributions from others eventually gave me enough info, although in the case of roof vent positions there seemed to be a lot of variations especially on LMR vehicles. Anyhow here's some photo's of the progress so far.

The roof finished and awaiting painting. From the photo's I have the vents seem in the right place but I would not claim to be 100% accurate. The original positions on the Bachmann coach can be seen. Some of the ribbing that was lost in the alterations has been restored since the photo was taken.

 

An new interior was also made as most of the vehicle is kitchen with a buffet counter at one end and no seating. The extension to the top of the buffet at the near end of the coach is to secure the top of a vertical post that has a small circular "bar table" attached to it, and cannot be seen from the outside.

 

The undeframe of the doner coach was inaccurate for the Kitchen Buffet, although the beauty of the Bachmann method of building was that a lot of the bits where re-usable , they just had to be moved around a bit. The main alteration to this side was the provision of an underframe mounted water tanks, the long white cylinder to the left of center and the resizing and joining of two of the propane cylinder housings to make one larger one. (Just to the right of the water tank). A couple of the single propane housings also had to move along the chassis. As this particular vehicle was to be Air Braked only, the vacuum gear was removed and air brake fittings fitted, (Just to the left of the water tank).

 

This side of the chassis didn't need as much alteration, the main task being the removal of the vacuum brake gear and the addition of a set of steps and an extra locker at the left hand end of the photo above. In both the above photo's the roof is only sat on the body so it does look a bit strange.

 

Most services on the ECML in the 70's ran with a Restaurant Unclassified Open (RUO) next to the Kitchen Buffet to provide seating accomodation for the serving of meals. The most common design in use was basically a bog standard TSO but with 2+1 tables and loose chairs for seating. (From 1976 a batch of FO's where provided for the same purpose and reslassified and renumbered into the RUO 15xx series). So with a Bachmann TSO to hand the conversion was undertaken. The bodyshell doesn't need any structural alteration, just the addition of a Red cantrail stripe, renumbering and in the case of my particular model the addition of "Restaurant" to the side. (Beware of the prototype as not all vehicles carried this branding at various times in their careers). The underframe was also altered from Vacuum to Air braked. Below are a couple of photo's of the rebranded vehicles. (Excuse the filler pipes/handrails on the ends not fitting as they are waiting the finishing of the interiors).

 

 

The interiors of the RUO required a complete rebuild, the interiors as supplied with the coach being totally unsuitable, although they did come in useful as a template. Tables and loose chairs for the new interior have come from Southern Pride with the new floor and partitions cut from 2mm plastcard. The photo's below show the progress so far with the half completed interior awaiting a trip to the paintshops before the loose chairs are added. This conversion has been surprisingly quick and simple to do, aided by the availability of the ready made tables and chairs.

 

 

The Kitchen Buffet is now ready for painting and with the 2d BFK awaiting the Blue/Grey treatment it seems about time to get the spray gun out. Two other catering vehicles are in the pipeline but these are a Bachmann Restaurant Unclassified and a Mainline Restaurant Buffet which only require rewheeling and renumbering. There is a Gresley Buffet started many years ago awaiting finishing but that will most probably be a long time in coming.

 

Paul J.

[Brian Kirby]

Looking good there Paul,

I'm particularly impressed by the way you've turned the RU sides to blanks, before converting them to the RKB pattern. I've been doing my RKBs from the Southern Pride etched kits, trouble is, the sides are wrong, the two 4' Buffet windows (corridor side) are etched as 3' size, so i've had to enlarge them !

 

By the way, these are the "improved" RKB etches, the first releases had this problem plus a window in an emergency door ! It might have been easier doing an RKB by your method.

 

Beware of SPs first release of the etched Diag.30 Griddle, it's got 7 out of 14 windows the wrong size, surely a record in kit manufacture. The second and current "improved" Diag.30 release still has one of the bar saloon windows the wrong size !

Cheers, Brian.

[Pugsley]

Wow, that's some impressive, heavy duty, conversion work there B) B) B)

[mark54]

Hi Paul,

 

Both your RUO and RKB have errors in the position of the roof vents. Although the RUO has the same body as the TSO the roof vent layout is completely different. Robert Carroll's Yahoo Group BRCoachingStock contains a diagram of the RUO vent layout. Also the 3 vents above the bar on the RKB are off-set to the kitchen side. This photo on Robert's flickr site shows it well. You are also missing a monsoon vent.

 

 

Hope this is of assistance.

 

Mark

[davidw]

Very interesting approach... Look forward to seeing it complete.

[robertcwp]

Very impressive models.

 

Here is a closer view of that image of the RKB roof but remember they were not all the same.

 

From around 1974, the ECML 'High-speed' sets had mostly Mark IIf open firsts rather than IId - and often had IIf seconds as well. I have seen photos of air-con 'High-speed' sets with Mark IIa brake firsts, for even more variation. The RU vehicles used were often the ones with a cupboard in place of four seats, evidenced by a whited-out window at the end of the seating area on the kitchen side adjacent to the pantry.

 

One thing I have never managed to work out is whether there were any external differences between a IId FO and a IId FK, apart from slight variations in how the blue/grey livery was applied. The difference being the lack of wrap-round on the grey panel on later-build IId, a change which took place part-way through the IId build.

[Enterprisingwestern]

Sometimes a thread comes along that blows your socks off.

This is one of mine, prototype information, modelling of the highest quality, what more can you ask for.

I doff my cap to you all

The downside of all this is that I WAS happy with my existing catering vehicles, of which I seemed to have garnered quite a few.

[mark54]

You are also missing a monsoon vent.

I'd better correct myself having studied a few more photos. It appears that the two vents above the Stills cafe sets in the kitchen and the sub-pantry were originally a small mushroom type but later were changed to the larger oblong monsoon type as seen in Robert's RKB roof photo. However some vehicles retained the kitchen mushroom vent for some reason.

 

Brian Kirby has also pointed out to me that the air-braked RKB don't appear to have V hangers (as correctly modelled by Paul). Does anyone know what the arrangement for the brake linkage was for these vehicles?

 

Mark

[Swindon 123]

Many thanks to all of you that have put forward observations on my efforts so far. Having studied robertcwp's photo I will have to move the three vents as pointed out by mark54. I am also not happy with the position of the monsoon vent at the buffet end and will reposition that as well. The other monsoon vent about halfway down the vehicle I will be leaving off as I do not have a spare one to hand and had also come to the conclusion, after a lot of photo studying, that not all vehicles had one. With regards to robertcwp's photo, the vehicle in front of the RKB also looks interesting as there is a hint of a red line along the cantrail and the door configuration looks to be for an 8 window coach without a center door. An early diagram 56 RSO perhaps?

I must admit that I had not payed much attention to the roof on the RUO, so I am glad the faults where pointed out. After studying photo's and looking at the drawing in the BRCoaching stock Group the correct vent configuration will be fitted.

With regard to the Bachmann RU I am going to leave it unaltered as E1980 as this vehicle lasted untill late 1977 at least in it's unaltered state, and was recorded in a "High Speed" rake. I will most probably stick with the standard Airfix/Mainline/Dapol 2d for the air con stock untill I can work out the differences between the 2d and 2f as well. A study of photo's has shown up a lot of "non standard" substitutions of stock on these rakes sometimes as operating failures/requirements dictated There is also a lot of scope to modelling some of the variations found in the Hull/Leeds/Brdford/Halifax splitting rakes for the mid 1970's.

 

Paul J.

 

PS. for some reason this post was posted twice so I have deleted the 2nd posting.

[robertcwp]

With regards to robertcwp's photo, the vehicle in front of the RKB also looks interesting as there is a hint of a red line along the cantrail and the door configuration looks to be for an 8 window coach without a center door. An early diagram 56 RSO perhaps?

I think it's an RSO. There is an indication of a word on the body side half way along, which would be Restaurant if it were an RSO. The SR still provided the stock for the Waterloo-Exeter trains at the time the photo was taken (note the Bulleid first also in the set) and had a few RSOs. S1010 and S1013 were still vacuum brake/steam heat in the 1967 Carriage Working Appendix.

[mark54]

With regard to the Bachmann RU I am going to leave it unaltered as E1980.......

You probably won't be thanking me for this Paul, but Bachmann cocked-up the roof of the ER version of RU. For some reason they have shifted all the roof detail at the kitchen end, including the 4 large vents and the oblong monsoon vent, up one section towards the centre of the coach. If you look at Robert's photo of 1961 and compare the position of the 3 large vents over the kitchen and the ridge-dome vent over the staff compartment you will see what I mean. Obviously some of the other detail is different on 1961 due to it being converted to an RBR in the 1970s. Bachmann got the saloon end right though.

 

 

Mark

[robertcwp]

You probably won't be thanking me for this Paul, but Bachmann cocked-up the roof of the ER version of RU. For some reason they have shifted all the roof detail at the kitchen end, including the 4 large vents and the oblong monsoon vent, up one section towards the centre of the coach. If you look at Robert's photo of 1961 and compare the position of the 3 large vents over the kitchen and the ridge-dome vent over the staff compartment you will see what I mean. Obviously some of the other detail is different on 1961 due to it being converted to an RBR in the 1970s. Bachmann got the saloon end right though.

 

 

Mark

I have uploaded the full-size version of this photo of 1961.

 

The bodyside change on conversion to RB(S) and later RBR was to eliminate two 3' wide windows and the emergency door between them. These were to the left of the remaining saloon windows, which have simply been painted blue as the vehicle appears in the photo. The chimney/exhaust pipe on the end is a much later addition too.

[Brian Kirby]

Here's my effort on two Southern Pride RKB roofs. Unfortunately the SP roof plan is not totally accurate, so i've based these on the Parkin plan and various photographs. Getting the positions right on these has been difficult, you can see marks where i have moved things around and i cannot claim them to be 100% correct. They are not exactly the same, one has only one oblong vent at a different angle and both have one scallop dome vent at the buffet end as a repair replacement. Not all RKB roofs are the same, especially in later years. The SP roof ribs have been removed, leaving a scar representing the weld lines.

Cheers, Brian.

[Swindon 123]

Once again thanks to everyone with regards to omissions and faults regarding catering vehicles. The RKB roof has now been altered for the third time and has gone into the paint shops along with a correctly configured RUO roof. Thanks mark54 for the heads up on the RU roof. At least the sides don't need altering, apart for numbers and possibly the restaurant lettering. Perhaps now I'll get back to the 124??

 

Paul J.

[the penguin of doom]

Nice work Paul.

 

Quick question...... How did you do the curtains on the Restaurant Cars?

 

Cheers.

 

Sean.

[Swindon 123]

Sean, the curtains are made from orange tissue paper obtained from any reputable stationers. I cut mine up into rectangles 10mm wide by the depth of the window+a little bit extra to allow for a slight overlap bottom and top, then scrunch or twist it up into a rough hanging curtain shape, then glued it onto the inside of the glazing using UHU. It doesn't look very pretty on the inside but unless your interiors are lit this doesn't show up. The tissue is thin enough to give a reasonable folded curtain look and also doesn't look too bad as a curtain drawn across the window if so desired. One packet of the stuff costs a couple of quid and should last a lifetime.

 

Paul J.

[the penguin of doom]

Sean, the curtains are made from orange tissue paper obtained from any reputable stationers. I cut mine up into rectangles 10mm wide by the depth of the window+a little bit extra to allow for a slight overlap bottom and top, then scrunch or twist it up into a rough hanging curtain shape, then glued it onto the inside of the glazing using UHU. It doesn't look very pretty on the inside but unless your interiors are lit this doesn't show up. The tissue is thin enough to give a reasonable folded curtain look and also doesn't look too bad as a curtain drawn across the window if so desired. One packet of the stuff costs a couple of quid and should last a lifetime.

 

Paul J.

 

Thanks Paul.

 

They look very effective! I may "Steal" your idea when it comes to fitting out my current project...

 

Cheers.

 

Sean.

[robertcwp]

This photo may be of interest:

 

47523_Doncaster_1130-Leeds-KX_13-2-78

[Swindon 123]

Many thanks for the link to the photo Robert. The rake is just the formation I was looking to recreate on Wibdenshaw. On a true "high speed" rake there would be an RU and RB in place of the RUO and RKB and the BG would be left out, but your photo does show a different formation to model. (The BG on the back end may have to be left out anyway, depending on the amount of "fiddle yard space" I can negotiate from Mr Wibble). The use of an early MK2 BFK instead of a 2d seemed to be common practice on the ECML. The photo also confirms the relationship of the RUO and RKB. On all the photo's of the two I have come across so far, the buffet end of the RKB is adjacent to the 2nd class and the kitchen next to the RUO at the 1st class end, with the toilet on the RUO adjacent to the RKB.

[robertcwp]

Many thanks for the link to the photo Robert. The rake is just the formation I was looking to recreate on Wibdenshaw. On a true "high speed" rake there would be an RU and RB in place of the RUO and RKB and the BG would be left out, but your photo does show a different formation to model. (The BG on the back end may have to be left out anyway, depending on the amount of "fiddle yard space" I can negotiate from Mr Wibble). The use of an early MK2 BFK instead of a 2d seemed to be common practice on the ECML. The photo also confirms the relationship of the RUO and RKB. On all the photo's of the two I have come across so far, the buffet end of the RKB is adjacent to the 2nd class and the kitchen next to the RUO at the 1st class end, with the toilet on the RUO adjacent to the RKB.

The marshalling instructions specified which way round catering vehicles should be, with the RKB usually being kitchen south and the RUO toilets north. Also, some workings specified taht the 2d/f FO was low seat numbers adjacent to the RUO or RU. The 'high speed' sets usually had Mark 2f FO specified - at least they did in 1974-5.

[mark54]

Many thanks for the link to the photo Robert. The rake is just the formation I was looking to recreate on Wibdenshaw. On a true "high speed" rake there would be an RU and RB in place of the RUO and RKB and the BG would be left out, but your photo does show a different formation to model. (The BG on the back end may have to be left out anyway, depending on the amount of "fiddle yard space" I can negotiate from Mr Wibble).

In the 1977-78 ECML timetable the 11.30 Leeds-Kngs Cross set's next working was the down 15.55 Leeds Executive. The BG would have been removed before the return journey. The public timetable doesn't denote this train as having 1st class passengers served meals at their seats, which was a feature of the "High Speed" eight coach sets.

 

Mark

[robertcwp]

Looking at the photo more closely, the FO on the left is a IIf and the one on the right is a IId (and could even be an FK, though I think the train was scheduled for 2 FO).

[keefer]

this is a great thread seeing the less common types being modelled and interesting prototype info as well!

 

incidentally were the RMBs very common on these types of rakes? i've seen pics of 8-coach rakes with, i think RU/RMB instead of RU/RB - they might have been in the harris mk2 book, but i can't find it to check at the mo'! presumably the serving capacity of the RMB would be less than the buffet in an RB, so possibly put in at short notice?

[mark54]

incidentally were the RMBs very common on these types of rakes? i've seen pics of 8-coach rakes with, i think RU/RMB instead of RU/RB - they might have been in the harris mk2 book, but i can't find it to check at the mo'! presumably the serving capacity of the RMB would be less than the buffet in an RB, so possibly put in at short notice?

An RMB in one of the 8 coach high speed sets would have been an emergency stand-in for a non-available RB to allow a buffet service to be provided. However the inclusion of an RMB would have impacted on the level of meal service that could have been provided as the RU by itself would not have had sufficient kitchen capacity to cater for it's own 33 (or 29) seat saloon and the 84 seats in the 2 FOs. Meals served to first class passengers at their seats was a feature of these trains.

 

The demand for meal service on the down Leeds Executive must have decreased when I saw the train at Kings Cross in summer 1977, because neither of the FOs were laid-up, only the RUO. Presumably this was why an RKB only was considered sufficient by then.

 

Mark