LochMaree

That's lovely work, Anthony. I wish my soldering was as neat. As for buffer heads, I turn them out of ordinary round nails. Lovely material to machine, but you do need to keep flux away from them as they do enjoy turning into ferrous oxide, so I usually glue them in after painting. I haven't in my Yankee Tank for various reasons, wasn't careful enough, so had to clean off some rust before painting. Incidentally, I now glue on the main boiler fittings. That way I can get them off much more easily than desoldering, after I stick them on wonky (which usually at least one is).

That's looking really nice, Anthony. It looks like a good kit you have produced there. 

In my scratchbuilt version (my first 2mm loco, long before the Worseley Works version), I managed to fit the decoder in as a post fit when converting to DCC, by shoving it underneath the water filler at the rear. I manged this, although it is fitted with a 1016 motor, so you should have room.  Admittedly, I used a CT Elektronick DCX77, no longer available in the UK, which is quite a bit smaller than the Zimo, but I think it should still be possible given you can still play about with the longitudinal position of the motor to some extent .

You'll need to be careful given the pivot position of the body on the underframe. It will mean you have very little dead load on the front wheels which will then tend to have a wee wander into the four foot at the slightest puff of wind particularly when it's going forward. (The underframe is getting pushed from the rear then.) The only way I have found to get round this is to add weights to the front of the underframe. Springs from the body might seem a good idea, but then you would be taking load off the body weight, which you want on the back end of the loco...

Incidentally, I see you have upturned ends to the steps. Not sure what period of the HR you're modelling, but the locos were built without the upturns. Generally, they only seem to appear post WW1, although there is one in the HRS collection which shows HR20 in 1912 with them. I ended up filing them off the steps on my loco when rebuilding the chassis. 

Alisdair