Blog- The GC and Met in OO - GCR open third, part III

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Well, after a few weeks of almost glacial progress, the open third is finished.

 

I underestimated how much work would be involved with this conversion; my previous Robinson stock being repaints and detailing of LMS period I carriages led me to think that this would be a quick little project. Wrong!

 

I left off last time with the bodywork largely finished and the interior not even begun.

 

I re-used the floor from the donor carriage, cutting off the compartment walls and smoothing down the floor. Then I filled the resulting gaps with offcuts of plastic sheet and to give a neat smooth top to build my new interior off of, I glued a sheet of paper down over it. This was then painted with Humbrol matt wine and the floor glued down to the chassis.

 

The seats were then manufactured from 0.5mm plastic sheet using a method detailed in 'World of Trains', circa 1992. 1mm sheet is used to make the divisions between each seating bay (I used 0.5mm sheet laminated), then 0.5mm sheet is brought into play. A thin sliver is glued each side of the division and then another 0.5mm piece glued on top of that to give a bit of a rake to it. 0.5mm sheet was then laminated to a thickness of 1mm and glued perpendicular to the division to produce the bench seats. It was a process that in all honesty came close to boring me to tears- no need to think about it, not very interesting and needed to be done over, and over, and over again- there are 32 individual seating bays on the carriage!

 

Once this was done and painted I reassembled the model, then decided to have a go at fitting handrails- my other stock I've noticed the doors don't stand out, so I experimented with adding them to bring a little relief to them. Brass wire was used, painted matt black (I did originally leave them in the brass finish, but thin brass wire tends to disappear against a mid-brown background).

 

I'm very pleased with how this has turned out.

 

 

 

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