GWMark

Thanks for your comments. I took a look at your thread as it is very pertinent to a future project. I actually have two more rail motors, one is a Mallard kit I built part built which has no casting, bogies and cylinders. I have a set of Blacksmith valve gear which will give me cylinders for this and a set of Gibson frames, so hence your thread is of great interest. My plan is the use the Gibson frames, Blacksmith cylinders and valve gear, a High Level gearbox and then scratch build the rest. I also have a complete 59" Mallard kit I purchased on eBay recently. This has everything so will give me patterns for soon of the missing items in the other one I have. I tried to get a set of valve gear or a motor bogie from Cooper Craft, who now owns the Blacksmiths kits, but the only things I could get are the buffers and the etches for the body. I have been told for the last couple of years that he plans to bring this kit back, but needs to redesign the power bogie and valve gear. Incidentally I have an RTR one on order from Kernow, but no date yet as to when this is likely to be available. If I get all these working I will have four, but at my current rate of progress it ill be several years before I see them all going! I've had a little more time since the previous post and know united the body with the power bogie and cylinders and was delighted to see it circulating around the club test track. I'm sure this Nucast one will never be the finest of models, but it is a bit of a case of Captain Ahab chasing his whale - of so long the failure to make this thing go has haunted me! As an aside I believe we may see a re-release of the Nucast version as part of Nucast Partners.

Thanks Captain. The signal box is not of a particular one, it is the Lcut Creative kit, I picked it up a couple of years ago because I wanted to see how their kits went together. It's rather a large affair to control the 3 points on this layout, so will not be used eventually. I'm really only using the baseboard as somewhere to store it!

The very first locomotive kit, if you can call it a locomotive, was a NuCast Steam Railmotor. In retrospect this was a poor choice for a first kit and could easily have put me off kit building for life, but I have liked the look of the rail motors since I first heard about them and the guy on the exhibition stall where I purchased it said it was not that heard to make. Oh well, you live and learn. Anyway, I started on this kit back in 2004 (as far as I remember), managed to solder the body together but got totally flawed when it came to the valve gear. SO it went back in it's box for about 4 years. I then tried again, using a Blacksmiths etch of valve gear, but again failed to make the thing go together. So back in the box again. A couple of weeks ago I thought to myself I would give it another go, so out it came again. The body was looking a bit sorry for itself, it had been stored on its side in the box on top of a kitchen cupboard. Perhaps it got a little warm, or perhaps it was just sheer weight, but the sides had sagged badly and at some point the buffers had taken a knock, near mind those are both easily solved problems. So I thought I would start with that troublesome valve gear. I decided to try the original Nucast etch again, it was somewhat more substantial than the Blacksmiths one, but had mostly the same dimensions. It would also mean I could save the Blacksmiths etch for an etched version of the 56ft rail motor I picked up on an exhibition stand. This was missing the bogies, casting and a crosshead, maybe I could make a second rail motor out of this, but that will hopefully be another entry in the future. This time I managed to get the Nucast etch to go together fairly well, a little fiddly, but it did all fit, or at least I thought it did. Then I found the wheels I had, 16mm Romfords as recommended in the instructions, had too much throw and caused the piston rod to need to be cut so short to avoid going out the front of the cylinder that it would fall out of the rear of the cylinder at the opposite end of the stroke. So off came the Romfords and on with a set of Gibson wheels instead. That solved the problem. The picture above shows the assembled vale gear, except the eccentric has been removed since it turns out the eccentric is too long and would cause the gear to jam at each end o the stroke. Looking at the Blacksmiths etch the eccentric on that set is smaller. So now I have the choice of making the Nucast rod shorter or stealing the rod from the Blacksmiths etch. I think I will at least try the former so that I can keep the Blacksmiths set complete. The other things that still needs resolving are the cylinders, which do not line up and slope downwards to the rear rather than being level with the wheel centres. Also I need to do something about attaching the eccentric to the crank pin, since to ream these out enough to fit over the Gibson crank pins would mean there would not be enough material left on the little cranks. I also need to look at a better way of attaching the motor to the motor/bogie mount as well, currently it is simply held in place with some wire wrapped around the mount. I had thought to replace the worm and final drive gear with a proper gearbox, but it seems to run well enough and that would mean changing the way the bogie is mounted to the body. I have to admit that it is really nice to see this motor bogie trundle down the test track with the valve gear moving as it should. Hopefully it will not be long before I have a completed rail motor. Another slight confession, as I finish this I do now remember that I did start to make a K's kit when I was a teenager, back in the dim and very distant past. However that was never finished, it did convince me of my hatred for epoxy as a method of construction however. That effort is now lost forever thanks to a house fire in the late 70's. So when I say this was my first kit, it was my first kit following my reintroduction to the hobby. The thing that is encouraging about all this however is that I think it must mean I have got just a little bit better at building loco kits over the years. So maybe there is hope for me!

...or at least that is the battle cry when the day starts. This autumn's Missenden Railway Modellers weekend has come and gone again, all to quickly as usual. After some organisational changes the team did splendid job of organisation so that it was seamless to those of us that attend, a big thank you to them. My project this autumn was the continuation of a High Level 12" Neilson Mineral loco that I started a couple of session ago. Although there were some problems, well only really one, me. I managed to loctite the final gear off centre and had problems then getting it to run well with all the bits between the frames. Fortunately Tony Gee was on hand with his hammer and more courage than I have and managed to move the gear for me. As always with these things having the tutors there is a great source of knowledge and courage to draw on and means rather than simply give up as I might at home on my own I was able to move forward, albeit that I didn't dare wield the hammer blow! It is running really rather nicely now, with consistent walking pace speeds and only a slight wobble when going backwards at higher speeds. My excuse is the really thing was probably a little bit that way. We also had the 7mm modellers in the loco construction room this time, which meant we had two tutors, Kevin Wilson on the 7mm side and Tony Gee on the 4mm side. This was really helpful since it meant there was always plenty of advice on hand, not only from the tutors but th either attendees. I managed to borrow a really rather nice pillar drill from Kevin to drill out all the 0.5mm holes in my castings for the van area, something I would have struggled with otherwise. So although the picture above may not look that complete I have a whole set of sub assemblies waiting to go on. The dome, cab instruments, brakes and cylinders are all sitting in a little plastic box waiting there turn to be attached. Now it's a wait until March for the Spring weekend, next time I am planning to branch out and do Iain Rathbone's painting and lining course - it's probably about time I learnt to paint them! As has become tradition my son Daniel was also with me, his project of choice this time was a Martin Finney Hall, maybe I'll get around to posting some pictures of that project and the High Level Kit that he finished at the previous weekend.

It has been a couple of weeks since my last post regarding the Mallard Duke. You may recall I had a bit of a problem with it that meant a slight rebuild and some remedial actions. That complete I have now done a bit more detailing, but more importantly I decided it was time to have it move itself along the rails. So I completed the task of making up the cranks, reaming them out and fitting them. After a bit of tinkering I had the cranks in place and quartered. I then looked at fitting the coupling rods. I decided I would used the Alan Gibson crankpin system, but instead of screwing into the wheels the screws go into the back of the cranks, a bush sits on the front, onto this is fed the coupling rod and then a nut added. Once the nut was tightened down it gave a fairly rigid fit, but I did have to countersink the cranks - somewhat hard after I had force fitted them on and quartered them. I did it with a burr in my mini drill without removing the cranks. I careful created a depression into the back of the cranks into which the Gibson crankpin sat. Partly this was required as if I left the screws proud of the back of the crank they caught on the rivet detail of the outside frames. It is all very tight in OO, I hate to think what it would be like in EM or P4 - lucky I don't work to those more exacting standards. After more tinkering it ran reasonably, I did have to replace the pickups again, the little sprung loops were exerting too much pressure on the wheels, so I went for more springy wire and reduced the drag the pickups placed on the wheels. Setting up the wheels on the axles was a bit of a chore, clearances are very tight and getting the same amount of axle either side of the frames was difficult. The next thing was to solder in the subframe that holds the inner frames in place and setup the fixing method for the frames. I also took the opportunity to add some lead in the firebox, the loco now sits happily on its wheels without the need to hang the tender off the back and will actually run as an 0-4-0 if the front bogie is removed. Other little jobs including tender handrails, vents, fixings and lamp irons. Both the loco and tender now have turned brass buffers, the sprung heads will be fitted after painting. The loco needs a top feed, pipe works for the top feed, clack boxes, lamp irons and the rest of the smokebox dart - once I make the part of have fitted no longer point at the sky! Not to mention of course the handrail, once the positions of rat handrail knobs have been marked out and drilled. Below is a video of it running, it is not perfect, there is still a slight tight spot I think, but it runs reasonably well.

Just to close this sequence of entries for the bank holiday weekend and my attempts at fixing the mistake of a few years ago I thought I would show where I was in the process of getting the dome and chimney in the right places. Basically I had fitted the smokebox and boiler the wrong way around and this resulted in the chimney and dome being further forward than they should have been. Today I had less time than I had hoped, domestic duties meant the toolbox was employed on garden gates rather than etched brass models for most of the afternoon. Also I persuaded my son to get out his E2 kit that he started several years ago and to have a go at finishing it. So of course I ended up spending time with him putting pickups on the Wills etched chassis and spraying the body with primer for him. However I did get some time on my Duke, I filed off the front, incomplete, boiler band where the dome had been incorrectly fitted. I also filed a gap in the rear boiler band to make space for the dome in its new location. Then I soldered a new boiler band on to represent the front band, now a complete circle rather than having a gap at the top. Finally I made the hole for the plug of the dome to fit in before trial fitting the dome. I seems I need to file back the boiler band under the dome slightly more as it is sitting on the band rather than butting up to it. Also I need to tidy up around the chimney and polish out some of the scratches the filing has left in the boiler. The than that there are two small components to go back on the footplate in front of the smokebox door casting. Once that is done and the dome soldered in I am back on I will be back to where I was on Friday! I would much rather have spent my time getting closer to finishing this, but I am pleased that the issue was pointed out and also that I managed to resolve it. Certainly in the past I might well have had the reaction of putting it back in the box and it never seeing the light of day again - much as I did with the first two kits I tried to build. Rather than do that I vowed to do something about it and do it quickly so as not to get despondent with it. And I have to saw it has worked, so even if I can't say I made big steps forward this weekend, it kind of feels that way. It even makes me think I might pull out those first two kits I tried, a Nucast steam rail motor and a SE Finecast Saint. The former has major issues with the power bogie and the later has a strange shape to the footplate and a white metal chassis that doesn't run properly. Why I thought trying to build a steam rail motor was a good subject for a first kit I can now now believe. Maybe these will appear in a blogpost some time in the near future.

I'm glad you did point it out. I would rather sort the issues now. Partly I decided to get on and try to sort it out quickly since I get the feeling if I had left it I would have ended up leaving it for a very long time. Thanks Mark

I thought I would document the latest steps in my efforts to resolve the build issue with my Mallard Duke. As noted in earlier posts I have built it with both the boiler and smokebox the wrong way around. The problem manifests itself in the chimney and dome being in the wrong place. This entry is about my latest steps to resolve the problem. The smokebox is simply a wrapper on nickel silver and white metal formers, so was relatively easy to remove and will be reattached the other way around. The boiler was a bigger problem, it could have been removed and turned, but there was a cut out for the motor which would have ended up at the wrong end. So I will have to relocate the dome, which means filling a hole in the boiler where the peg of the dome went through the boiler. I had decided I would fill the hole with solder, but obviously the solder would just fall into the boiler, so I got a bit of scrap etch to put inside the boiler, question was how to get it there. My solution was to bend the brass to shape, drill a hole and solder in place a brass lace pin through the hole in the scrap brass. The idea was to poke the pin through the hole in the boiler I needed to fill so that I could hold the plate up against the inside of the boiler tube whilst flooding the hole from the outside with solder. The next issue was to get the plate down the boiler tube and into position. My solution to this was solder a length of brass wire to the underside of the brass plate and use the wire to manipulate the plate in the boiler tube. I used low melt solder for this joint with the intention that when I applied the heat to flood the hole with solder the brass wire would simply fall off. With a little bit of fiddling, and bending the wire slightly I got the patch in place and proceeded to fill the hole with the highest melting point solder I had. I deliberately overfilled the hole so that I was sure when I filed it back to shape there would be no pits. Rather nicely the brass wire fell off as hoped and could be withdrawn from the boiler. I now had a mound of solder with a brass pin sticking out the top and no more hole in my boiler. After cutting the pin off as low as I could the files came out and I spent a happy hour filing back the solder to shape, attacking it with a brass wire brush and then the dreaded fibre glass pencil until I have a smooth surface which followed the contours of the boiler. Next I started to put the wrapper back, this time with the hole for the chimney to the rear and not the front. It is not completely soldered in place yet, but it is looking a lot better than the low point I was at yesterday. I still need to finish attaching the smokebox wrapper, add back the footplate detailing I removed and then look at removing part of the rear boiler band and the two parts of the front boiler band before adding a complete new front boiler band. Not to forget of course fitting the dome in the correct location. However I now feel a lot more confident that I can get back to were I was, only this time with the chimney and dome correctly positioned. I had been dreading sorting this out, but actually it was not as bad as I feared, although it would have been better if I had built it right in the first place. You live and learn, but at least it was not a fatal mistake and often more is learnt by making mistakes and correcting them.

Thanks Mike. In thinking about it overnight I came up with a plan to do something very similar. My thought was to take section of brass, curve it to the shape of the inside of the boiler. Then drill a small hole for a brass lace pin, pass the pin through that hole, put this complete piece inside the boiler and pss the pin through the hole. Then I can use the pin to pull the brass into place, solder it and cut the pin off. There will need to be plenty of cleanup both before and after, but I think I prefer that to using some kind of filler, I just get the feeling that will fail on me. I am also wondering if it might be best to file off the existing boiler band bits either side of where the dome was and put a whole new band on rather than try to patch the missing section. Obviously I need to attach this without melting by solder filler, I might have to resort to soldering just the parts attach to the rest of the boiler and running a little superglue onto that section, or just have that small section sit in place held by gravity and the rest of the band. Still that is a long way off, first off is al the cleaning up. Mark

If you read my previous entry you will have seen that I managed to mess up somewhat when I did the assembly of the smokebox and boiler on my Duke. Both the boiler and smokebox had been assembled the wrong way around, this resulted in the chimney being too far forward and the dome being on the wrong ring on the boiler. I had thought of two option, reverse both the boiler and the smokebox or reverse the smokebox wrapper and move the dome without removing the boiler. I have had to go for the second option as there is a cutout in the boiler bottom to allow the motor to slide in. If I reversed the boiler I would have this cutout behind the smokebox and it would be very visible. In looking back at the instructions the smokebox is formed onto white metal formers, so I had tinned the wrapper and soldered it on with low melt solder. The edge of the wrapper, where it met the footplate was soldered with 145 solder. So tonight I unpicked along the footplate, bending the wrapper back slightly with a knife blade. The I filled the smokebox with boiling water and with a little bit or gentle persuasion removed the wrapper and the white metal smokebox front. Dipping part of the boiler in the boiling water I also managed to get the dome off without removing the springs - I really did not fancy having to redo those, they were hard enough the first time. The picture above shows what I am left with. I will need to clean off the solder that was used to attach the dome, fill the hole that the peg on the base of the dome went into and add the missing bit of boiler band. Then I should be able to remove some of the rear boiler band, drill a new hole and attach the dome in the new position. As for the wrapper, it will need a little bit of work to remove some surface solder and to get it back into shape, but I hope I can resolver it the correct way around. Then refit the smokebox front and the two little fillets I removed from the front and hopefully I can start to move forward again. One thought had been to use the RSU as a way to reattach the former from the output, but I have never tried an RSU when it comes to attaching brass to white metal. Has anybody else tried this? Filing the I can just about get a soldering iron into the smokebox from below, at least I could do some from the inside. I've yet to come up with a method to fill the hole, any suggestions are welcome. I did think of using a plug of white metal that I could solder in and then file to shape. Not sure how well that would work. I have to admit I was sorely tempted to put this kit back in its box and move onto something else, but I decided that would be a bit defeatist and against my new policy of finishing this - but it was very tempting!

Hi Grahame, the gearbox I used was a loadhauler+. It fits very neatly between the frames and gives just the reach to get the motor into the front of the firebox. I just hope I can resolve the results of my stupidity without have to take the whole thing apart. Mark

:-( No, they were not. I can see what I have done, about 3 years (or more) ago when I attached the boiler and smokebox I have put them the wrong way around. So the chimney should be towards the rear of the smokebox and the dome on the first boiler band ahead of the firebox. Thanks for pointing this out - I don't understand how it missed it, it is so obvious when I look back at the drawings. That has rather put this project back, I'll have to see about removing the boiler/smokebox, disassembling them and putting them back the other way around. That does not sound like an easy job. I get the feeling my resolve to finish things before moving on might just have taken a knock! Ah well, best to have found out now and it can be added to another of the "lessons to be learnt" about this model model lark. [Edit: addition of second option below] I guess another option might be to unsolder the smokebox wrapper, turn it around and resolver it. That would move the chimney back and get the rivet lines sloping the right way. Then I would "just" have to remove the dome, fill the hole in the boiler, put a new boiler band in. Remove part of the rear boiler band and resolver the dome in place on the right band. The dome was put on with low melt, so should come off reasonably easily. Filling the hole might be a little tricky to make look good. Hopefully the smokebox wrapper can be remove without too much fuss, but this was 145 solder, so will not be as easy. Um, which way to go?

I've recently made myself a promise not to start any new projects until I finish some of the part built, stalled projects. We will see how long that one lasts, but by way of a start on this new resolution I got my Mallard Models GWR Duke out of its box and have done a little work on it over the last week. Although it may not look like it has progressed much, there has been a fair bit of fettling going on. I removed the pickups I had put on before, they were a little fragile and prone to get caught and short on the body. It now has much neater pickups made by winding some springy wire around a small diameter rod to create a spring. It means the pickups are very much shorter and less prone to getting in the way or moving around and creating shorts. The rear wheels have the pickups mounted on the underside of the frames, the front drivers on the top surface of the frames. They still need a little adjustment, and I managed to bend one so have a short again at the moment, but I think they will work out better than before. I have also put some work into the balance, with lead added where possible and making the tender bear down on the loco to help move the balance aft. There is still some room in the firebox for some more lead, but I want to get some sheet lead to cut to profile rather than using the lead shot. I should be able to add about 5mm thickness of lead against the cab bulkhead - inside the firebox. Also by the time there is a white metal crew on the footplate I should have more weight to bring the balance back. The dome and safety valve went on, the former being a large white metal lump that had an adverse effect on the previously mentioned balance. The cab roof was rolled and soldered on tonight, along with the ribs underneath and progress has been made on the tender with the addition of the axle boxes and some white metal castings since the loco last graced these pages. I have also put the steps in place, although I managed to melt part of one of the etched steps (middle tread overlays) with the RSU when I removed the probe before taking my foot of the peddle - actually I sneezed so it was not entirely my fault. There is still need for a considerable amount of cleaning up to remove some of the excess solder. Also the fall plate has been put in place and the ride height of the tender and loco is now much better. I also found I am missing the tender tank vents, hopefully I'll be able to pick some up at Railex this weekend. I've started to make up the cranks ready for the fitting of the rods, but I want to get the thing balanced better before I put the rods in place. Drive is to the rear axle via one of Chris Gibbon's very neat gearboxes. this means I can keep all the cab detail whilst keeping the gearbox between the frames and nothings shows below the frames. The motor is a Mashima 1020 mounted vertically in the firebox - not sure if this will ever be up to pulling much of a load - we shall see. Still lots of little jobs to do, making up the last of the cranks, tank vents, smokebox dart, lance cock, more cab detailing, handrails, buffers, lamp irons, sand boxes, the list seems to go on forever and all that is before any thought of painting, transfers etc. Although my new resolution may not include painting as I might well go for a batch painting session or save up the models to take to Missenden and do the painting there under the expert's eyes! [Edit - addition of the two later photos to illustrate what I was trying to describe]

Thanks. I suspect it will have some weathering, but maybe not too heavy

I completed most of my Black Hawthorn at Missenden Abbey, however there were a few bits to finish off that I thought I would do at home, pipe runs, stays etc. Of course I didn't get around to it until today, needless to say those "little" jobs took a long time, very fiddly in places those pipes. However here it is, I think it is now ready for painting, after a bit of cleaning up. I added some lead shot in the smokebox before putting the door on and also in the base of the bunkers on either side. In all I managed to get the loco to weigh in at 84 grams. However that was with the backhead (white metal) not in place, so that might add another 5 grams, plus a white metal crew. Still I think it is not going to win any tug of war competitions anytime soon! I already have my next High Level kit underway, a Neilson Mineral, I do like these little kits, they are so well thought out and everything fits. Maybe I'lll post a picture on the progress of that kit next time I have it on the workbench.

Taken on an organised night time shot at Didcot over the Easter weekend. Tornado was hired for the evening along with a number of re-enactors. Flickr Album

For some time now I have been thinking about ways to make things other than the locomotives move on my layouts. Radio Control servos have become an accepted way to control the points and semaphore signals, but we could use them for more if we had a good way to integrate the proportional control of them into our control systems. So instead of just having something move between two positions we could make it move to any point we wanted. It was with this idea in mind that I started playing around with ideas for how to get better control of servos. The obvious thing we all have is a speed control on our layouts to control the speed of our trains, so what if we could use that to control the position or speed of a servo. Given that I am a DCC person, the natural choice was a DCC decoder that instead of driving a motor could drive a servo. My first prototype was simply a decoder, based on an Arduino processor, that moved a single servo at the speed set by the throttle. This would allow me to position one servo to any point I wanted in its travel, setting a speed of zero would stop it. This was a good first step, but something like a crane would need more than one servo, it would be a pain, and a little expensive to have a decoder per servo. So the next step was to control multiple servos from one decoder. What I did was to write code for the decoder that would use a combination of a function and the throttle setting. Turn on function 0 and the first servo could be controlled by the throttle, turn on function 1 and you control the second servo. Turn on two functions together and you control two servos. Added to this I allowed the maximum travel to be defined, and the minimum time for that motion. So now I had a way, via DCC CV's to define the two endpoints of the movement of a servo, expressed in degrees, and a time in seconds that it should take to move between those points if the throttle was set to full speed. This gave me what I wanted to control something like a crane with 3 servos for the rotation of the crane, the angle of the jib and the winding of the chain. The prototype decoder was shown to my local MERG area group, who liked the idea so much we ended up doing a couple of tutorial evenings during which about 20 of the members built the electronics and learnt how to program the servos and DCC library for the Arduino. ​Following on from this the idea of extending the decoder to also control stepper motors was introduced. In fact the motion obtainable from stepper motors was much better and smoother than the servos. I introduced the idea of either having the stepper motor run continuously or confining it to a number of steps in each direction, so that it behaved more like a servo. Next came the addition of lights to the decoder, so that we could put warning lights on our cranes. Until I ended up with a DCC decoder that could drive 3 servos, one stepper motor and 4 lights (with various effects). If anybody is interested the code for what I did is available on GitHub. I have been working with one of the members of the local MERG group to automate an LGB cement mixer in G scale. He now has a cement mixer mounted on a wagon that drives up to you, with the mixer turning via a stepper motor, swings the delivery chute out towards you, using a servo. Turns on a warning light. It then reverses the direction of the mixer and dispenses Smarties down the delivery chute into the hands of the waiting admirers! I also took the Arduino DCC decoder idea a slightly different way and created a decoder that could play sound effects, essentially a primitive sound decoder. The effects were recorded sounds files placed on a microSD card that was then inserted in the Arduino system. A particular function key would trigger the playing of a particular sound file. These effects could be adjusted to match the speed setting of the throttle, and hence give a synchronised chuffing effect. Nowhere near as good as a commercial sound decoder, much more a toy, but the bits for it cost me less than £10. It was more for my amusement than anything else, but it was fun to try. This has been another diversion for me from building rolling stock, working on my layout or all those other projects I have started but not finished, but it has got me to learn a lot more about the DCC protocol, I now understand exactly what gets put on the rails and makes the locos move. Also I have something that is at least able to animate scenic items under the control of the same DCC handset that I drive the trains with. Plus I have enjoyed working on it, so does it matter that it has diverted me from other things - it's only a hobby after all! ​Maybe the thing that makes this an enduring hobby is that there are so many ways we can go, just because I am not good at painting a back scene or my weathering skills are a bit dodgy it does not mean I can not enjoy some other part of the hobby. Equally I like making locos, but if that's all I did I would probably get bored with it after a while. It makes you think, or at least it does me.

There have been a few changes in those 10 years, not least looking at your two young operators in the photos - certainly the one that belongs to me has got somewhat taller. It' always been a pleasure to go out to exhibitions with Fisherton, possibly the highlights being the best in show award you received at the Astrolat show, the appearance at Warley and of course operating it on the platform of Salisbury station. The look on the faces of the passengers getting off the trains were something to observe.

This post is a bit of a cheat, since it is not my work I am showing. In my post yesterday I showed the stock I weathered, including Daniel's (my son) first loco build at the age of 11. Eight years later he is still going and here is his latest project, as promised. The loco is a High Level kit of a Hawthorn Leslie, he has been working on it over successive Missenden weekends under the tutorship of Tony Gee (t-b-g). It's now really at a stage of a few final tweaks before painting, a job I suspect I will be asked to undertake. When I look at the soldering work now and the the finish he is achieving it has come a long way from that first GEM kit. It helps of course to be working on a first class kit and to have advice from some really proficient loco builders (not me I hasten to add). He is a great proponent of resistance soldering, every time he goes back to university I have to check he is not sneaking off with my RSU! Importantly it runs as well as it looks, being a very smooth, slow running loco, helped of course by the excellent 108:1 gearbox. He has now moved on to build a chassis to go under a Taff Vale C Class. It's a resin body from Dean Sidings, but he has chosen to go down the route of taking a Comet chassis for a 14xx and turning it into a 4-4-2 instead of using the chopped up 14xx chassis from Hornby. Perhaps more on that as he progresses with it.

I was rightly criticised on two counts by Daniel for my previous post, I didn't include any pictures of his stock and I also said all his stock was all ready to run. So by way of redress here are a couple more pictures from my weathering efforts on his stock. The 4MT is a Bachmann model, Daniel has added the crew, lamps, detail parts and a real coal load. I made an attempt to weather it. This loco is due to haul a rack of coaching stock bunker first, so hence the ugly tension lock coupling is still on the front and the lamp is not visible as it is on the bunker. The 56XX is from a GEM kit with a Comet chassis. The actual loco was built by Daniel about 7 or 8 years ago now, it was his first attempt at soldering white metal kits and well maybe not the best example or up to his current standards it is not bad given the vintage of the kit and the fact the builder was 11 or 12 at the time. Up until now it has run on Hinton Parva at exhibitions unweathered, but now it will feature a somewhat patchy weathering job. If I am allowed to I think I will revisit this one and add some detail in different shades.