Ringer the Belle.. Dodgy Dublo 5-BEL power cars

[Captain Slough]

Vintage fakery! There's nothing genuine about these. 

i made these out of very scrappy Hornby Dublo pullman brakes around 1995. Adding a SR-ish cab was a work of an hour or so with plastikard and milliput for the roof shaping....  painting and transfers, well , there's the rub. Took SO LONG!! And the linings detectably not as straight as it could be. Not my finest work. 

I learned later that the Triang pullman body actually has the right carriage side profile for a Belle and these dont really. I had, and have, loads of spare Triang pullmans, and plenty time to kick myself over this.  
i also later obtained a pair of genuine Wrenn Brighton Belle bodies, also shown below as a comparison, sitting on another repurposed Hornby-Dublo chassis with a variety of bogies.. 

I never motorised any of these, working them push-pull with a pullman-livery Lima class 73 or one of my 33s instead, and eventually giving up on that due to the deficiencies of the H-D bogies. One of the Dublo Belle driving cars has Hornby mk1 bogies under it now but I never finished doing the whole lot... (also got some centre cars for the brown& cream one but not for the blue/grey one)

if anyones interested in taking either of these on as a cut price alternative to the excellent Hornby model let me know. After 25 years in storage the remaining Hornby-dublo wheelsets will need some serious attention to make this run freely, you should factor in the cost of new bogies for all vehicles. Roofs need repainting too, were white but now aren't

 

Wrenn shells have original paint and Wrenn glazing with printed-on window hoppers. Dublo shells have South-East Finecast flushglazing as the H-D glazing was beyond repair.

 

 

Edited March 7, 2023 by Captain Slough

[Captain Slough]

I was always strongly tempted to repaint one of my Triang Blue Pullmans in classic pullman livery. It was the pain of lining and transferring these that put me off. 

 

Anyone ever done that?

[BernardTPM]

Being a contrarian I am looking to do a homemade N gauge 5-BEL in the Corporate Pullman livery (i.e. like the Mk.2 Pullmans). Given they did paint some Golden Arrow Pullmans that way it must have been a possibility at some point.

[melmoth]

8 minutes ago, BernardTPM said:

Being a contrarian I am looking to do a homemade N gauge 5-BEL in the Corporate Pullman livery (i.e. like the Mk.2 Pullmans). Given they did paint some Golden Arrow Pullmans that way it must have been a possibility at some point.

 

It's just a supposition, but I think once they'd seen how the GA Pullmans in Reverse Blue/Grey looked, they decided to stick with the basic scheme.

 

[BernardTPM]

Only the Southern Region used the lined out version of Blue/Grey on Pullmans (and with non-Corporate lettering to boot), but it is true the reverse colours didn't sit easy on the flat sides.

[Halvarras]

7 hours ago, BernardTPM said:

but it is true the reverse colours didn't sit easy on the flat sides.

 

I think that's a serious understatement Bernard!! 🤭