Renovating the Replica Railways ex-LMS open coach: The Outcome

[teeinox]

Many thanks for all your comments and research on my last post.  Where we left things was that my aim was to renovate the coach so that it would look reasonable running with more modern Hornby coaches.  This is the story of how things went.  So read on about the thrills and spills!

 

ROOF

As suggested by markw, the roof profile and ventilators appear to be those designed for the Collett “Sunshine” coach; not right for a LMS coach.  Whereas I had thought that the wrong roof profile caused the roof to be too low, it turned out that raising the coach a fraction resolved the problem.  As for the ventilators, the best solution was to cut them down to size because as a shell ventilator they are well moulded, just too tall.  They are moulded with a spigot which fits into a hole in the roof.  The mode of assembly appears to have been to put them in place “dry” and then apply a dab of glue onto the piece of spigot that protruded inside the body shell.  So, just by snapping off that piece, most of the ventilators came out without trouble.  Then I had to cut them down to size.  This was a tricky process, but it worked for most, though some are cut a tad too short.  Then they were glued back in place directly onto the roof.

 

WINDOWS

The deep-set windows needed to be given a more of a flush look to match the Hornby coaches.  The only option I could find was SEF Flushglaze.  I read the various opinions in this forum about the product and did not come away enthused.  But on balance it seemed worth a try, so I got a pack.  The big windows seemed to work well.  However, the Flushglaze created a clumsy “Bottle glass” effect in the ventilator windows, and no glazing was supplied for the tiny panes at their extreme ends.  Instead, I glazed them with plain glazing strip.  But in mixing glazing types, I’ve ended up with a bit of an uneasy combination which I am not sure looks right.

 

COACH ENDS

Besides being rather clumsy, the gangway connectors were misshapen.  For one of them, I glued in pieces of plasticard to keep the sides of the connector vertical.  For the other, the bits box came up with a tailboard.  It was tidied up and then glued onto the connector.  It holds the connector in shape, hides the clumsiness and looks right for a strengthener.  I sanded off the moulding marks from the buffers and reduced those on the headstocks.  Here is a photo of the end of the coach compared with a Hornby one.  While you can see the difference in roof profile, it’s not too bad.

 

 

However, viewing this photo led me to check the Flushglaze glazing with a straight edge.  I found that it projects slightly beyond the sides, which is one reason why it doesn’t look quite right.  This was my first go using Flushglaze, and If I were using it again, I might shim the fixing flanges so that, when fitted, the glazing was slightly recessed similarly to that on the Hornby coaches.

 

The LMS classified this type of coach as “QF”, and according to Jenkinson and Essery, the B.R. equivalent was TO/SO.  From the way the seats were crammed in (60 in a 57’ vehicle), it was more of a TTO/TSO!  The Hornby coach has the letter “A” on either side, while the Replica does not.  Does anyone know what it stands for, and should the Replica be so adorned?

 

UNDERFRAME, BOGIES & WHEELS

The trussing bar supporting the voltage regulator was distorted in an upward curve.  I cut the supports at the top and put in a piece of plasticard to push the assembly down to level it.

The bogies are fine, though rather compressed vertically compared with the Hornby equivalents.  The plastic wheels, while they run very well, are undersized at about 13.8mm.  As a result, the coach rides slightly low.  I tried but failed to remove these wheels.  The bogie side frames are incredibly tough and unbending, and I was beginning to use more brute force than I was comfortable with.  Bear in mind this plastic is 30 years old and I did not want a sudden fracture.  While the wheels have been left in-situ for now, this is a setback I shall have to revisit.  A consequence of their being undersize was that I had to lift the coach body by about 0.3mm to raise it to be level at cantrail height with the Hornby coaches. This gave the visual effect I wanted, and, amazingly, with just that alteration the roof heights came level despite their different profiles.

 

COUPLINGS

My first choice would have been to install a close coupling mechanism.  There were some Keen System mechanisms in the bits box, but installing them meant having to cut a big hole in the underframe to give wheel clearance.  This did not seem like a good idea.  So, as the coach was to be a strengthener, one bogie was fitted with one of my standard Simplex couplings.  The other one was equipped with a NEM socket containing a Hornby close coupler.  The NEM socket is screwed to the coupling extension on the bogie and can rotate around the screw, but there is no centring mechanism, and it hangs lower than I would like.  It’s all a bit of a kludge, but it seems to work O.K.  And on the straight, the distance to an adjacent gangway connector is as good as you get with the proper close-coupling between Hornby Staniers.

 

INTERIOR

The solution to the warping of the interior was to cut off the end which was particularly bad and glue it back on, straight.  This got rid of the “hump-back” in the tables which had been so noticeable.  However, I could not eliminate a slight corkscrewing in the moulding which means that it is still not quite level.  Then it was a matter of painting.  My guess was that in B.R. days the seats would have been a dowdy red.  However, the LMS did use some brighter fabrics, and not having dowdy red in my paintbox, I chose a brighter red.  As for the table-tops, the pictures of vestibule coaches in Jenkinson and Essery typically show them covered in a sort of dark coloured mat, I would guess to protect the table finish.  In B.R. days I fear they would have been covered with grubby grey, peeling vinyl, so grey paint it had to be.  Here is how it looks:

 

 

Happy to change the horrible table colour if anybody can tell me what was correct for B.R. times!

 

PAINTING

Given that the maroon body finish is very good and my repainting skills are not so good, I decided to live with the misaligned lining.  Painting was confined to picking out the door furniture, painting the cantrails black, touching up the roof where the manufacturer’s grey spray had not done a great covering job, and giving the underframe a coat of black paint to remove the “plastic” look.

 

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Dismantling had been a risky business because I had to bend the coach sides so much to release the spigots.  So I drastically reduced the projection of the end spigots: the middle ones remained as is.  Despite this surgery, it holds together fine.  Here is the finished article next to a Hornby coach:

 

 

To my mind, it co-exists very reasonably with its much younger Hornby neighbour.

 

So, for your further entertainment, here are photos of two formations featuring the Replica coach.  The first is of the inter-corridor set strengthened with the Replica coach.  We can imagine it heading for the South-West to be combined at some point with ex-GWR stock for its onward journey to Penzance.

 

 

Naturally, it is hauled by a Warship, but not this one: the Mainline Warship is barely capable of hauling two coaches on the flat!  The second photo illustrates a Western Region mixed formation.  In John Hodge’s and Stuart Davies’s excellent book “Railways and Industry in the Tondu Valleys: Bridgend to Treherbert”, there is a shot of the 11.38 SO Neath – Treherbert train on 16th April 1960.  This was a 4-coach corridor train which seemed to consist of 2 ex-LMS and 2 ex-GWR coaches, including a Hawksworth CK still in carmine and cream.  Motive power was a 56xx tank locomotive.  This is my re-creation of it, though almost certainly it never had the vestibule coach.  Modeller’s licence!

 

 

So what have I got for my time and money?  Well, I have ended up with a very acceptable layout coach of a much-needed type for an outlay of just under £25.  And if Hornby or Bachmann were to bring out a model of a general service vestibule coach, would I ditch this one?  Not necessarily.

[teeinox]

I had no plans to get another Replica Railways ex-LMS D1915 open coach.  But someone on eBay was selling one, together with a Mainline ex-LMS composite, both with replacement Hornby metal wheels, for £23.50 including postage.  That’s £11.75 a coach.  What’s not to like?

 

Renovation of the coach was a repeat performance of the one I had already done, except for the windows.  I was not happy with the SE Finecast Flushglaze windows, so this one got the original glazing replaced with simple glazing strip.  However, the lavatory windows were interesting.  Scanning Jenkinson and Essery’s book revealed that the LMS had several different approaches to obscuring the glass.  On the Hornby models it is a solid opaque white, but that is not universal.  Sometimes the glazing is more translucent with what appears to be the use of a patterned opal glass.  And that is the type D1915 appeared to have.  To model that, I kept that part of the original glazing which had a textured surface and washed over it with a very thin coat of white.  The ventilator portion of the glazing got an additional coat of white because on the prototype that appears to be more opaque than the main window.   To emphasise the white further, I painted the interior of the toilet compartment white.  Here are the two coaches together:

 

 

Comparing the two window treatments, neither looks right.  But on balance, I prefer the simple glazing because there is no optical distortion, you can see the interior more clearly and it retains the proportions of the window which, somehow, the Flushglaze disturbs.

 

As for the coach with Flushglaze, after I had taken the photograph, I removed the glazing (it came out quite easily) and replaced it with simple glazing.  So the two coaches now look the same.