D869

Coming together nicely Pete. When is the joint publicity event with Ikea planned for? Or maybe they will be persuading you to do a Swedish themed layout for your next project.

Good to see CJM still progressing. Like others, I'm sure the huts will be fine once suitably grotty and with surrounding evidence of life (weeds, junk, worn pathways etc). I agree about the gate - time to brush up on your soldering skills. That way it might survive when you forget to stop your train to open it. Regards, Andy

Yes. Chris Pendleton used a springy bit of phosphor bronze but in his design it was protected from damage by the rest of the connector. I could probably add this on the underside of the strip and it would get some protection from the pin above it.

I've found that having a show in the diary focuses the mind quite well. Having said that we now have more stock that we can fit on the layout so it might not work any more.

It's kinda small - 1/32 inch brass rod. I reckon that sawing that in half lengthways is a bit beyond my powers with a piercing saw.

I do put a slight bend in the pin to give it some more 'grip', but still it's not 100% perfect. 500mm is getting closer to being useful but I bought mine in 6ft lengths. I wonder whether Eileen's can get them in longer lengths if you ask nicely. Regards, Andy

Err... no I didn't. Sadly not. The moral seems to be that paint will fill things in when you don't want it to but not when you do. Milliput might have been a better bet but at the moment there isn't anything I can immediately do about it without some repainting and it's not really annoying me it so I'm leaving it for another day. There's also the question of how the filled joins will look after weathering. It's only really visible in the sort of stupidly close up photos that we all like to put on RMWeb. These days I often see problems from my photos that I don't notice in real life. Regards, Andy

Thanks Pete. He maintains that with this anti dust cabinet I am really spoiling D604. The cassettes originated many moons ago when Chris Pendleton had just published his design in MRJ and Copenhagen Fields and Denys Brownlee had started using 1/4 by 1/16 brass for 2mm fiddle yard tracks. I combined the two ideas. This design allows close to scale spacing for double track but the joints are a bit of a pain to make and don't always give 100% reliable electrical contact. I'm also not too sure about the availability of suitable brass strip these days. I got mine from a local non ferrous metals company in nice long lengths but I have no idea where I would get hold of some now. I think it's important to get some strip with nice clean square edges - the stuff that is in the K+S stands in most shops these days appears to be guillotined which gives a rounded edge. When I built these modules the K+S stuff had cleaner edges... although the strips were too short to be suitable for whole train modules. Regards, Andy

Nice wagons Rich. I'm sure that organisations exist to help you with your addiction. Regards, Andy

This is a catch up installment on D604... and quite a long one. I was quite keen to get it into a presentable state so that I could use it at TINGS, so that meant no mucking about on RMWeb for a little while. In the last installment the basic shape of the bodyshell was completed but the detail was yet to go on. There is a lot less to add to the class 41 than the class 22, but there was still some work to do. The roof has most of the right things in the right places. Unlike the 22 there is no overlay so the panel joins are etched into the main body shell. The snag with this is that the underside of the roof is etched with lines to make rolling easier. Where the two etches cross we get a hole. This means that the panel joins show a sort of morse code effect. I tried to fix this by filling the underside with solder but it needed a lot of cleaning up and tended to fill the whole panel join in places. After doing two joins I left the others in the hope that the paint might fill up the holes. The other thing that needs to be changed is the boiler top in the centre of the loco. There seems to be a misapprehension about what was on this panel. My old Ian Allen drawings book shows a circular hole with a grille mesh. This is what Allen provides, as does the Etched Pixels detailing pack. All of them are wrong. Photos show that there was indeed a circular hole but that this was almost completely filled by a solid disc with just a narrow gap around the edge. I used some dividers to mark out two circles and then filed out a disc that was a little smaller than the hole with some 'spokes' sticking out to the edge of the hole. This needed careful filing and fitting but was eventually soldered in place. As you can see in the photo it now looks just like a broken etched line but I hope it will look better when fully painted and weathered. The photo also shows the morse code in the panel joins. There was not too much work to do on the sides. For the boiler filler doors I used the parts from the Etched Pixels pack. The vertical louvres for the upper cooling group intakes were made from Evergreen car siding. This has very fine lines moulded into it, intended for American match board sided vehicles. Even so, the lines were too far apart for my needs, so I cut enough out to do all of the vents and then carefully scribed an extra line down the middle of each 'plank'. The results aren't perfect but I'm reasonably pleased with them. And so to the ends. I had chosen to model the loco in a form that was a close match for the etch in the kit. I used the oval vents provided by Allen and kept the horizontal handrail holes. One of the vertical handrail holes was drilled out to take a lamp bracket and an extra hole marked for the middle lamp bracket. The brackets themselves were cut and filed from 5 thou N/S strip and soldered in place. The (tail?) lamp on the right hand door had a surround added using 5 amp fuse wire wrapped around a drill and then cut to make a stack of circles. I changed my mind a few times about the headcode discs but in the end went for having them removable. The discs themselves are from an Etched Pixels etch and have a piece of 0.5mm brass wire soldered perpendicular to the back. The nose is drilled to take these wires, hopefully as a push fit. Three of these holes go in the middle of etched circles. The fourth goes at the bottom of the left hand door (Allen only provides an etched circle on the right hand door). The discs were then stuck into a piece of blu tack and painted. Each closed disc is different, depending on where it sits on the nose, so the result was like a little flower bed, as you can see in the photo. The buffers on the class 41 show a rather higher degree of design thought than most later locos - they have neat fairings to give a smooth transition between the buffer body and the nose. Naturally there is nothing off the shelf to suit this so I cut some short lengths of brass tube for the buffer bodies and opened up the holes to be a push fit for some oval plastic buffer heads that I bought years ago (I think they were labelled 'Lima' but don't know if that label was accurate). The surrounding area was then built up with Milliput and filed when set to give a smooth transition. One of the buffers lost its Milliput during filing, so I stuck it back on with super glue which seemed to do the trick. While doing the other nose detail I was getting increasingly uneasy about the oval vents. They just looked too long compared to the real thing but I didn't have any great ideas for how to make better ones. In the end I decided to bite the bullet and have a go at fixing them. I unsoldered them from the nose and then cut them in half with a string knife. I then filed down the cut ends until I thought that the reduced height looked right. Then I soldered them back together... easy to say, not easy to do. After trying a few ways the best way seemed to be to place both pieces on a flat card in the correct alignment and then trap them under a second piece of card to hold them still. Then add plenty of green label flux and apply the iron. This approach had a reasonable success rate without too many burned fingers. The reassembled vents were then cleaned up with a file and scraper and stuck onto the nose with super glue (there was no way I was going to attempt to solder them on). While out for a meal just before the body went to the paint shop I remembered that I had not done the 'eyebrow' vents. Once back at the workbench these were added using very thin slivers of 5 thou plasticard super glued in place. Next to the paint shop. The first task was to chuck the body into a bowl of warm water and scrub using an old toothbrush with Flash floor cleaner to de-grease it. This is also a good test to see if any bits fall off. After a rinse the body was given a blow dry with the hair dryer before being mounted (using gloves) on a block of wood and put in its Ferrero Rocher anti-dust cabinet. I noticed a few flakes of Milliput lifting from the roof area when drying the loco so these were carefully removed before going any further. The body was then sprayed with Halfords grey primer before being put aside to dry. On inspection a few hours later the results were not quite what I had hoped.Many of the places where the Milliput had been sanded to a feather edge had lifted a little leaving the edges of the filler looking quite obvious. Drawing on past experience with hairs in the paint on my sleeping cars, I got some wet and dry paper and used it wet to smooth down the blemishes. This was followed by another blow dry and a second coat of primer. This time the results were much better. The next coat was Humbrol matt white on the ends, followed by Humbrol signal yellow. At this stage the loco looked like it was in the old BR 'dutch' livery. Here's a photo, but you don't really get the full effect. Next the warning panels were masked (Tamiya tape) and the loco sprayed with Precision BR green. I mixed in some white again, but made sure it was a new tin on this occasion so there were no problems with white flakes in the final finish. I sprayed on quite a warm day so used plenty of thinners. I gave the loco a fairly decent coat, hoping that a smooth finish would allow neater lining. After a few hours to allow the paint to set but not fully harden the masking was removed. I'm always quite disappointed at this stage and wonder whether the end result is going to be at all convincing. Here's a photo. I scraped the paint off cab window frames before the green had fully hardened. This might or might not be good practice but it was probably motivated more by wanting to see something relieve those huge areas of dark green. The last paint job (after the green had properly hardened) was to mask around the roof panels and wrap the whole body in paper and then spray the roof grey. Once this was dry came the lining - a 2 day job using the Bob Moore pen. I have to say that the results weren't quite as good as I had hoped given the improved smoothness of the green finish. The transfers are a mixed bunch. I'm still relying on resurrected Woodheads for the BR totem and the electrification flashes. I'm running out of numbers on this sheet so I ordered some new numbers from Cambridge Custom Transfers. These came with D600 and D603 ready made up, but sadly not D604 so some degree of cutting and fiddling was needed. The CCT instructions recommend against using decal setting solution but I was not convinced. I did an experiment on a test panel and I thought that the result was better with Micro Set than without, so I used it on the loco. Regular readers may recall some difficulties with varnishing and Micro Set. I had resolved this problem last time around by a simple time saving expedient - just don't bother with the varnishing. The Woodhead transfers (in combination with liquid decal film) seem pretty tough. The CCT instructions and advice from others were, however, pretty clear - some sort of varnish is required. After discussing this question on the 2mm VAG I was recommended to try Testors Dullcote. This turned out to be tricky to track down but eventually I managed to buy a tin from a wargaming shop on the Internet. I gave it a try on a test piece and the result was very matt indeed. Although I intend to weather D604, I didn't feel ready to dull the finish to this extent. In the end I decided to go back and try the Tamiya varnish again, but making special effort to keep the coat thin. The photo below shows the result. Oh dear! Looking at this in reflected light it seems that the milky white deposit has a very matt finish in comparison to the unaffected area, so I think that rather than being a chemical reaction it might be something to do with Micro Set's surface tension affecting properties preventing the varnish from forming a smooth layer. I wasn't too downhearted this time because I'd managed to fix this problem on the Hawksworth coach. I did the same thing on D604 - using a fine brush and some well thinned Precision green I managed to erase the white deposits where they were most noticeable. I also tidied up the ends of the lining and a couple of slightly ragged edges as well as touching up a couple of paint chips on D6309. By now it was the Thursday night before TINGS and I was starting to be quite pleased with the result. By Friday lunchtime when I left to load St Ruth I still had no nameplates. I'd been asking Shawplan for these for quite some time but Brian had been away. I rang him when he returned on Wednesday and he promised to put them straight in the post. When I got home on Friday evening they had indeed arrived. I quickly fitted some windscreens cut from 10 thou glazing fixed with Formula 560 Canopy Glue and finally added the nameplates. I've always had kittens when gluing nameplates on, having tried epoxy (too slow and messy) and super glue (too fast and sometimes also messy) in the past. Since the Canopy Glue was to hand, I thought I'd give that a try. I found it ideal - applying a couple of small dots with a compass point and then putting the nameplate into place I could just see the glue squeeze to the edges. It also gave me enough time to make adjustments and after a short rest was sufficiently well set to allow me to do the other side without too many worries. The only real problem that I had was very odd indeed - for some reason when I did the second one everything had become statically charged and the nameplate is so small and light that when I put it on the loco side it stood right up on its edge and jumped away from the place where I wanted it. No amount of touching radiator pipes or other earthed conductors seemed to help but fortunately the Canopy Glue was stronger than the static electricity. Here's a photo of D604 ready to go to TINGS where it successfully started to earn its keep. Cossack is still far from finished. Most notably the chassis detail owes far more to a class 47 than a class 41 so this will be the next job on the agenda.

Thanks Alan - didn't realise that you were a 'fellow traveller' in building this kit. I agree - scraping some paint off (although fiddly) is a much better option than silver paint.

I'll look forward to that - haven't seen Tucking Mill yet, other than on RMWeb. I'm sure it could use a diesel hydraulic or two.

We're trying to keep things to (roughly) two shows per year so that our families also get to see us now and again. Our next booking is for Railex 2013 - 25/26 May. I was thinking of a D:ream song title, but thought it might look like a criticism of the show, which wasn't what I wanted to do. We at least managed one whole day with one signal working, so we learned a bit. Perhaps surprisingly the route indicator worked perfectly. The signal arms had some minor issues with drift and stickiness which were (I think) caused by having their operating wires touching each other as they run up the post. We really need to have a major re-think of the control system and power supplies for the signals though. At the moment we haven't even fully figured out what caused the power supply to die or the servo glitches. The Dapol 22 looks pretty close to being ready. The only things I could see that need to be sorted are better clarity to the cab glazing (and presumably a cab interior) and blackening of the wheels. The Western was also there in unpainted form so that looks somewhat further away. Dave did tell me some dates, but I forgot them... in any case it was hardly a binding contract. I also asked him about bogie design, wheels and gears. He told me that he will always use pinpoint bearings in future (except for the Western, obviously) and that gears are chosen to suit the loco, so they will keep on changing between locos... so not much hope for drop-in finescale wheels. One thought does occur to me... just how many different gears do you need to suit bogie diesels and electric locos?

I was contemplating some rather lame puns for the title of this posting but I thought I would spare you all. We're just back from two days at the N Gauge Show which takes place in a barn on the Fosse Way near Leamington Spa - just down the road for us... which turned out to be just as well. I'm glad to say that St Ruth performed well during both days with just a few minor issues appearing during opening hours. The same cannot be said for the setup day on Friday... We had given ourselves plenty of time because we wanted to do some setup work on the new signals once the layout was up. Having completed a one hour stint adjusting things mechanically and programming the servo travel I was just packing stuff away when the signals went haywire and all of the lights on the control panel started flashing on and off. John pulled the plug quickly and then we noticed a nasty electrical burning smell. Unfortunately this happened shortly before the hall closed so in the remaining time we could only find out that the smell appeared to be associated with the power supply box and that none of the points would move. Then we had to leave without really knowing what we needed to replace to make the layout work again. So we arrived as early as possible on Saturday armed with pretty much everything that we might need including the kitchen sink. The signal controls were all disconnected and the 12V supplies piggybacked from a bench supply. Thankfully we then had a working layout for Saturday, albeit with non working signals. On Saturday evening I lashed up a MERG controller to some switches on a piece of ply to try to get the signals working again, fed from yet another bench power supply. Another early start on Sunday had this installed on the layout, followed by more mechanical and programming adjustements. Finally we had the home and starter working. Unplug the programming cable and the starter leapt up out of the ground because of a massive servo glitch. Suffice to say that further attempts to get the starter working were all followed by another glitch so the starter remained static. At least we had one signal working though. We were also joined by guest operator and 2mm committee member Jim Allwood who brought along some interesting things to run on the layout, oh and a Dapol Voyager that is about as uncontrollable as mine (2 speeds - flat out and stop). Some photos, mainly of more recent additions. I thought I'd try a photo from the opposite of the usual perspective. Jim Allwood's tamper and class 14. For once St Ruth was running every WR diesel hydraulic class... although there are no plans for a class 14 to be added permanently to the roster, The home signal and route indicator with a loco that some may have seen on the Hydraulic Heaven blog. Cossack again, arriving at St Ruth. One more building added since Nottingham - the hotel on the corner.

Nice vans Pete. I especially like the SR van. I must have missed that one when it was available - an unusual failure for my gloat box purchasing department. DGs after midnight? I wasn't aware that it was possible to fit DGs at other times of day. There is a drawing in the Oakwood book on SR Passenger Vans. Darned strange looking things though. Regards, Andy

Thanks Don and Jon. Probably true, but I've read that the cabs on the class 41s were originally done using alloy castings welded together. I'm not sure how far this construction extended. I've also read that some cast body parts were replaced with sheet fabrications when they realised that it was all getting too heavy.

Thanks Pete - one to ponder if I'm thinking of a new career move. I must admit that one had not occurred to me. Another thought - a layout on a surfboard? ... maybe not.

Isn't that what rules are for?

Thanks Rich. I remember a workplace joke (long long ago) in which someone tried to convince a not too computer savvy colleague of the need for 'electric tippex'. Maybe you need something along those lines? I wasn't too sure of the shape myself, even after looking at photos because they all seemed to tell me something different. Fortunately it starts to make more sense when you try to form the curves in three dimensions. I pity anyone trying to do it on CAD though... I suspect they used good old fashioned lumps of clay to figure out the shape back in the 50s. I must admit that I wasn't too keen on these locos before I started but they certainly have 'presence' and are rather growing on me, at least up to the point when some bright spark tacked headcode boxes to the fronts.

Nice selection of trains there Pete. With so many to shuffle around I guess you will be thinking up an elegant way to store all of the loaded cassettes in your fiddle yard... with card mock ups and all? Regards, Andy

A second installment of the D604 build... In the previous episode the body was just starting to go together but was still short of quite a few important external panels. Next step was to fit the nose ends. Unlike the class 22, these are far from flat so they had to be bent to the correct curve. This was tricky for a couple of reasons. Firstly there is no good reference to use to find the 'correct' curve, so I had to judge this by studying photos. The NBL factory photos showed that that there was a shallow curve where the gangway doors are and I thought that this became more pronounced on either side. The second thing that's tricky is forming the curve. The presence of the etched lines for the gangway doors means that the end just wants to fold along those lines so it needed some careful work with pliers to form the curve by creating small bends in the plain parts of the etch and trying to avoid creating a fold at the door edges. There was also quite a lot of straightening things out again where I'd gone too far. Soldering the end on is also tricky because there is nothing that can easily be used for alignment, nor is it even entirely clear what the vertical alignment should be. I knew that the top of the nose had to curve downwards so I worked from this. In doing so I decided that the bottom edge of the nose etch was actually too low, so aligning this edge with the bottom edge of the valence was a non-starter. In the end I used the top corners and aligned these slightly below the top corners on the side etches. This gives a reasonable 'drop' between the windscreen surround and the nose. I was a bit wary of the fold lines at the ends of the sides but in the end decided that I just needed to have faith, make the folds and see how things worked out. After tack soldering the ends to the sides, I got out the set square and some nice flat surfaces and spent a lot of time peering at the model to see whether the nose was truly vertical and in alignment with the central pillar of the windscreens. Naturally my first attempt wasn't quite right, so adjust and try again... After the experience with the class 22 I was expecting the cab roofs to be straigtforward. The class 41 kit contains similarly shaped etches which are even labelled as cab roofs, so what could go wrong? I rolled one of these around my solder sucker and tried it in place. It dropped straight through the cab. It seems that these etches are too small in both directions which is pretty strange. I was going to need to make new ones. After a pause for thought I had an idea about how to make this easier. I dug out the used etch from the class 22 and some 10 thou sheet (brass because I had no nickel silver). I then used the hole in the class 22 etch as a template to scribe the shape of the roof. Cut it out with scissors, clean up with a file and I found that I had a pretty good fit at the first attempt. With hindsight it should have been a little longer because I had some tricky filling on the outer corners where it meets the windscreens. As per the class 22, I used thick fuse wire and plenty of solder to fill the gap between the roof and the windscreen surround. For the top of the nose I thought that filler was going to be the only practical answer but I needed something to apply the filler to. I cut some strips from the edge of the body side etch and curved this to the shape of the windscreen bottom. A second shorter piece was added to meet the middle of the nose end and the whole lot soldered between the sides to leave a decent gap below the windscreen surround. I also added a short piece of 20 by 40 thou nickel silver so that I could anchor the bottom edge of the windscreen surround to give it some strength. The photo below shows the kit at this stage. I did my best to fill the nose corners using solder, but there is only so much that can be done here because there are some sizeable gaps near the top. I also had my first attempt at forming the various curves on the corners, filing off the excess etch and solder where needed, but I knew that the real work of forming the nose shape was yet to come. Now it was filler time, so I attacked the nose with copious amounts of Milliput and also added some to the cab roofs because these were not in perfect aligment with the main roof. At this stage I also had second thoughts about the curvature of the nose, so I added more Milliput so that I could have a gentler curve all the way to the edge. Here is the result. Looking good eh? Now I'd reached the make or break part - shaping the nose. To begin with I decided that I had to get a consistent shape with some reference points, even if it was a long way from the final shape. To do this I tidied up each face so that it was either flat (the sides) or had a simple single curve (the nose and top). I deliberately left the corners as sharp angles so that I could check for symetry and get both ends consistent. The next four photos show things at this stage. I'd also checked the photos again and decided that my initial thoughts about the nose curvature were correct, so the extra Milliput was filed off again. Finally it was time to shape the corners. The top of the nose is fairly level for about half of its length and then it curves downwards to meet the front panel. The joint between the two is still quite a sharp angle though. The body corners are the really tricky ones because no two photos show them in quite the same way. In the end I decided that there was a comparatively large radius near to the bottom but that the curve was a sort of conical shape because at the top the radius reduces to almost nothing. Finally the corner between the nose top and sides was rounded off - this one was fairly simple - and the top corners blended in. After finishing both ends I was much happier with the shape of the second one, so the top of the other nose had to be re-filled and shaped again. I haven't attempted any detailed photos to show the final shape because the combination of white Milliput, shiny solder and shiny nickel silver makes it very difficult to see with the Mark 1 eyeball, so I reckon that the camera will have no chance. Running my finger over it seems to be the best way to check the shape, but I don't think you can do that yet on RMWeb So here's a photo of the loco with the nose shape fully formed. I've also started to add the nose detail, but more on that next time.

Hi Pete Good to see you're progressing. One suggestion to ease the use of your 4-CEP (or whatever decent length train) with a split cassette is to fit magnetic couplings between the coaches... by which I mean couplings made from rare earth magnets and small bits of steel. I have these on some of my coaches and they really make life easier when setting up and packing away as well as giving very close coupling... must get round to doing the rest. If you don't need your coaches to go through crossovers then you could go for a really simple solution and put the magnets inside the gangways. I tried this and it's really easy to do... but it will make your coaches drag themselves off the track sideways if you show them a crossover. My couplings now are mounted on the Farish coupling housing which solves the crossover problem but is much more of a faff to do (but still worth it). Regards, Andy

Err... no. I guess it would be a Kernow special rather than a Dapol own brand job if the 4mm version is anything to go by, not that either company is likely to share their future plans with me. I did notice that Dapol have announced the class 22 in 'N' though... which might have put me off building a blue one from the Worsley kit and could also be part of the reason why I wound up building D604. Wish they'd hurry up and get the Western onto the shelves.

The story so far... as regular readers may remember, we are at a point where we just about have enough locos to run the schedule at St Ruth. Recent additions from my direction prior to the Nottingham show earlier this year were a Farish Warship and a much modified Western, both in maroon. A long time ago I promised myself that I would not be building a class 41 Warship - these were the very first WR hydraulics and were rather outside the WR's hydraulic concept, being the result of a political fudge by the BTC so that the WR got its preferred transmission but not the lightweight German inspired body design - instead the design and build work was done by NBL in Glasgow along similar lines to the LMS 'twins'. Apart from being WR's 'unwanted' locos, my own chosen period is 1968-72 and the class 41s were withdrawn in December 1967... although it may be that this was why my chosen period starts in 1968. I've since become rather more flexible, having realised that pushing the date range back a few years allows me to dilute the never ending stream of Mark 1s on the coaching stock front. While operating the layout it also occurred to me that it would be nice to introduce a bit more variation to the diesel hydraulic roster so my views on the class 41 have mellowed... to the extent that I have now splashed out on one of the Worsley Works kits. Rather than dithering for ages over the choice of prototype (after all, there are only 5 choices) I have selected my intended loco before starting this build. It will be D604 'Cossack' - the last one built. Like their smaller class 22 cousins, the class 41s went through a lot of detailed changes in spite of their extremely short lives, so choosing the combination of these changes is another important step. I've gone for August 1965 on the basis of a photo in Strathwood's 'Looking back at Warships' showing D604 at Laira in work-worn condition. This was not her final condition because all of the class were fitted with 4 character headcode boxes before the end... but in my view these always looked like an afterthought, apart from being a pain to fit to the model. So, to the model... step 1 was to cut a socking great hole in the side. Why? - after checking photos I found that the layout of one side was incorrect. The BR crest and nameplate should always be to the right of the centre door, but on the etch I received there was a boiler filler door and a louvre vent in the way. I thought briefly about whether I could live with this but it didn't take very long to reach an answer so I drilled 4 holes a short distance away from each corner of the louvre and used a coping saw to turn these into a square cutout with a reasonable margin outside the louvre vent. I then chopped a second hole in the new intended location and after a fair amount of fitting and filing I soldered the louvre into its new location. I then tidied up the first hole and cut a piece of 10 thou to fill this in. The etched boiler filler door was filled with solder and all of the solder joints scraped and sanded flush. I doubt whether the fix will be completely invisible but once the nameplates etc are in place I think it will be very inconspicuous. I will fit new boiler fillers to both sides using the Etched Pixels parts. In case anybody else is considering this kit, I have contacted Allen about the error and he has corrected his artwork based on the prototype photos that I sent him. Step 2 was to further butcher the sides. One of the earliest changes to these locos was the removal of the louvres over the upper air intakes for the cooler groups. The modified intakes seem to consist of a very fine vertical ribs which are practically invisible in many photos. Unfortunately neither the original kit nor the detailing pack from Etched Pixels caters for this configuration - a shame because the locos spent the majority of their lives in this condition. I convinced myself that I had at least one way to represent the later intakes before hacking out all of the upper louvres. I found the best way to do this was with a sharp knife with a piece of steel behind the etch, keeping a stone handy to resharpen the knife at regular intervals. Once the majority of the louvres were removed I cleaned up carefully with needle files, taking care not to distort the remaining pillars. I mentioned the Etched Pixels detailing pack. This contains some extremely fine overlay etches for the louvres. They are beautiful etches but on a practical level I could not see how I was going to be able to use them - they are at a finer pitch that the Worsley louvres so could not simply be overlaid. I could have removed all of the Worsley louvres but this would have left the new etches unsupported and I don't think they would survive normal handling without some sort of backing. In the end I reluctantly decided to save these etches for a future project. After completing the butchery of the sides it was time to fold up the main body and fit the two bulkheads. This has gone in a similar manner to the class 22 so I won't repeat the description. The ends of course are rather more complex than the class 22. The kit provides a fold up inner support for the nose which I fitted next. The cab window surrounds were the next item. The side etch has a smooth curve between the windscreen pillar and the nose but photos show this to be incorrect, so I filed this to a sharp corner which also simplified the fitting of the windscreen surround. That's about all in terms of progress on the body for now. Here's how it looks right now. Given the smooth running of the class 22 I spent some time searching for a pinpoint bearing chassis but was unable to find anything with suitable dimensions... actually that's not quite true - the US 'Erie Built' diesel is about right and there is a reasonably modern model but apparently they are like hen's teeth, so pinching a chassis from one of these is very unlikely to happen. Instead I've gone for the usual option of a Farish class 47. I've opted for a BachFar one because the class 47 bogie centres are too far apart for the class 41. I intend to shorten the bogie centres in the same way that I did for the Western. The chassis is in the process of having various changes made (e.g. improving pickups) but I'll spare you the photo of what looks pretty much like an off the shelf item.

Nice one Pete. Like the extra flappy bit for the bay line. I'm wondering how you hold the non hinged side of the join closed and whether you will be adding anything to hold the flappy tracks in alignment while the layout is in use. Regards, Andy