Skinnylinny

The separate parts I've spotted so far (on the loco, not having disassembled the tender yet): Driving wheels, 2x coupling rods, chassis base(with spring detail), running plate, 2x buffer heads, coupling hook, brake pipe, Westinghouse pump, 4x splashers, cab backhead insert, cab, cab glazing, smokebox door, boiler (main), boiler (bottom section), safety valves, whistle, 2x boiler-side pipes (brass), boiler-side pipe (black), 2x brass smokebox side lubricators (?) A lot more going on here than on, say, the Mallard or some of the other models. Just goes to show how lucky we are to get all this for less than £10!

At the risk of being smug, the Dremel has come out and a Hornby Jinty chassis has been chopped about a bit, as has the bodyshell. There is enough space for a modern Hornby 0-6-0 chassis to fit, but it will need the rear chopping off (which is time-consuming with hand tools, to say the least!) and you'll end up losing the bottom of the boiler. The splashers are separate fittings, and can be popped off carefully, which will allow you to file out the wheel slots in the chassis, which are slightly too fine for the Hornby wheels (on the outside face only). If people want to know, I'll try to do a "what I did" to show how to do it. I also found that the backhead detail can also be left almost intact, but the cab floor needed to come out to allow the Hornby chassis to protrude slightly. If I had the tools to slice a chunk off the top of the chassis (to lower the body's ride height) even this would not be necessary. However, the copper pick-ups on the Hornby chassis show rather spectacularly where the boiler bottom (a separate part) should be!... (note: It turns out that the splashers mostly hide this, which is helpful! Still needs a spot of black paint though.) Edit: Yes, I realise I've got the coupling rods on upside-down, I'll have a look into that!

A closer inspection reveals that the spokes aren't, in fact, solid, but there are rather large springs behind them that give this impression. I've tried to show this in some of the photos below Apologies for the quality of the photos, but a phone is all I have to hand. Hopefully they show areas of interest, and give a general impression. Despite appearances in the photos, the lining is red and a bright primrose yellow, but my phone seems to be interpreting it as green.

I'm just heading home from picking up a few examples of the C class, and I'm generally impressed! First impressions are that the lining, while simplified, is very sharply applied, and the loco number plates on the two I have looked at are beautifully rendered - the "South Eastern & Chatham Railway" around the number is clearly legible. Sadly the model's appearance is let down by the boiler bands, which appear to have been applied freehand with a brush and are somewhat blobby. I'll admit to not knowing much about the details of this class of loco, but to me, it definitely looks like a C. Hopefully I will be able to post photos shortly.

That's very helpful, thank you. Looks like I'll be looking into Gibson wheels then, and trying to find a suitable gearbox. My No.1 will have to be a true "single" after all!

I've also been considering a similar conversion, using the Bachmann chassis (or bits of it) underneath a Kitmaster bodyshell, but my main concern is whether the wheels are actually the correct size? Would it be possible for you to measure for me the wheel diameters and the horizontal distances between wheel centres please? I'll be watching this with great interest!

Wow! Colour me very impressed; I'd be delighted to work to that sort of standard in 4mm or 7mm! Absolutely fantastic modelling.

Cor, look at that "Unmistakeable 1930s pea-green livery"... Can't be that unmistakeable; I always thought it was apple green!

I managed to pick up a copy of the Castle Class issue yesterday after some fuss - my usual Smiths had run out, so a quick phone call and a dash across Edinburgh got me into W H Smiths at Cameron Toll 3 minutes before closing, where the forewarned cashier had kept a copy behind the counter for me. A quick glance and the printing looked OK, so I paid my money and left them to shut up shop. FIrst thoughts: Apart from a lack of gold paint-coverage on the safety valve cover, the printing on this model seems actually to be pretty good. There's no smudging, it's beautifully sharp and (to my untrained eye) the typeface on the main nameplate looks rather good (though the "Castle Class" section has a green background on one side and a black background on the other, as noted earlier). Today I got the Dremel out and spent a thoroughly pleasant half hour gently carving away the cross-members inside the tender and carving back slightly the back edge of the mounting in the boiler (to allow the Airfix chassis weight to fit). A quick check that everything fitted (one or two small adjustments were needed to the tender chassis, mainly filing about half-a-mil off the front of the chassis box) and I was presented with this. It may not be perfect, but it's a huge improvement over the warped and slightly-melted bodyshell I had before. Tomorrow's job? Getting the Araldite and plasticard out, and a few small touch-ups of paint (mainly cab controls, and a spot of brass around the cabside windows and safety valves... Overall shot of loco + tender Proof that the Castle Class does sometimes come with good printing! With thanks again to railroadbill for his earlier post which convinced me that this would be an easy project. Much easier than a kit build, and it will certainly be something different on the Edinburgh and Lothians club's Scottish-based layout on Tuesday!

I've an Airfix Castle sitting on my shelf here that was obtained second-hand (or more probably, fourth- or fifth-hand. Unfortunately the bodyshell shows signs of melting (!) around the splashers and other parts. Could anyone with both a GBL and Airfix Castle tell me how easy it would be to attach a GBL bodyshell to the Airfix chassis? Many thanks to TheWeatheringMan for another comprehensive and useful review above. Thanks in advance, skinnylinny

Looking carefully at the picture, I'd be tempted to suggest that the "brake gear" looks more like the "web" between the tender wheels, due to them being cast as one piece. If it is, that'll be a huge pity as it will ruin the open look of the tender chassis, and will be nearly impossible to hide without taking a saw to the metalwork.

Morning, all. Just to wish anyone else with examinations (be they school, college, university or employment-related) some good luck; I'm not looking forward to the five university exams I have this week. The first one starts in a little over an hour, so I'm in the computer labs, frantically trying to cram a few extra marks' worth of knowledge into my skull for a few hours, before forgetting it all to learn more for tomorrow!

I was recently at Shildon for the Great Goodbye, and had been hoping to get a set of *something* featuring all six A4s. Even the little enamel pin badges would have come to over £20. However, I bought a copy of this magazine today to see if it had the potential for some bashing into another variant of A4. I'm not too worried about little detail differences, but my main concern was whether the side skirts could be removed. As it happens, it can: This was done simply by scoring the inside edge of the skirts (following the corner in the moulding) with a scalpel, then snapping the skirts off - they come off remarkably cleanly. The photo is pre-tidying up and fettling (and shows the body just mounted on the chassis and wheels without the brake gear). It still needs the front skirt section removing too. I might end up with a set of six of these in various conditions. After all, one of them is done already, and they'd be cheaper than (if not quite as finely detailed as) the Hornby set!

A strange moment when in the Pendon video, the commentator proudly states "The overall scale of the viaduct and the train is one centimeter to the foot, or one seventy-sixth of the actual size." Um... does this mean I've been scaling things wrongly all these years?