Plastic wagons can be remarkably durable beasts and only rarely can one be said to be beyond repair. My first attempt at one, an original Parkside Grampus, was not an ideal choice, in part because of the nature of the prototype with its intricate baskets to hold the removable end planks when not required on the wagon and the design of the ends in three, prototypical bits located on poorly mould pins and holes. This may be why the body still isn't entirely square. Not entirely Parkside's fault, it was rather challenging 14 and more years ago and the chaps in Kirkcaldy have, in fairness, been back and produced a rather better kit for the Grampus. I've built one of those as well.

When originally built, in OO, with brass Romford wheels and with only minor extra detailing; replacement buffers (Kenline I think), three-link couplings and an attempt to represent all those door springs I was relatively pleased with it. I've had another couple of goes at it since, replacing the tiebar between the W irons with scrap etch when the plastic ones went 'ping' and replacing the buffers with better (ABS) castings. A bit later, I had another go at the weathering, changed the wheels for 8-spoked, EM examples (some prototypes really did have 10 spoke wheels), replaced the long-link brake gear with some leftover parts suitably shortened from a more modern Parkside Tube and tweaked the axleboxes to better resemble some real ones. At the same time, I loaded the thing with ballast.

Moving on several years, I like to think that my standards have risen further. Having assembled quite a rake of flat-bottomed engineers types, thanks to Roger Chivers and Parkside, with a handful of Medfits thrown into the mix, this poor old Grampus was starting to stand out and the time has come for its third, and hopefully last, rebuild. This is very much a scrapbox sort of operation using odds and ends from other projects so hasn’t actually cost any money, merely a little bit of time. It never occurred to me to take a 'before' shot so this will have to do:

Having popped the wheels out, the whole wagon was popped in jam jar of water and the ballast soaked, cajoled and, eventually, dug out with a screwdriver, taking the plasticard load base – and one of the sides – with it. This made adding a planked floor (hand-scribed 20 thou’ plastic – very hairshirt finescale...) rather easier so no harm done, the side was tacked back on straight afterwards.

The brake levers and vees went as well and replacements came from a combination of bits from Dave Bradwell and Masokits who do a nice GW pattern ratchet lever guide. Must do the safety loops too. I realised at the same time that I'd placed the centremost door springs in the wrong place. Two I managed to save, the other two pinged off, I know not where. Someone, somewhere, must have done an etched underfloor basket for these but I've never seen one. Does anybody know better? The door securing chains are stripped from multi-strand wire twisted round a 1mm drill. these were ten secured with a drop of cyano' and a small 'wedge' of 10 thou' to hold the in place. The wedges were trimmed off a scalpel later. here's the 'after' shot:

With the aid of Paul Bartlett's photo's, I've finally got the ends more or less correct. How much easier would it have been to have replaced these bits in the first place? Important lesson: replacing duff components is almost invariably quicker and less stressful than modifying them!

The last little job was to replace the kick-steps on the left-hand corners. The modern Parkside kit has some neat mouldings in tough plastic. Mine were fettled up from some bits of scrap etch and 0.75mm brass angle, carefully fretted with a piercing saw.

If faced with something similar, my advice is to talk to the chaps at Kirkcaldy about spares; the current version has some nice moulded ones. It's now ready for a touch up and a return to traffic. Was it worth it?

Adam