D869

Progress continues on the class 22, albeit rather more slowly now that the days are longer and I'm often out and about enjoying the nice weather for more of the evening. This posting is rather an interim update to say that "I'm still here" rather than a blow by blow account of particular bits of the model, mainly because I don't think that I've done much that is really 'finished' since last time. No photos either, because the appearance really hasn't changed noticeably. Attention has now shifted to the chassis and plenty of challenges seem to be presenting themselves in that department... I've added some body fixings - these are 'L' shaped brackets soldered to the cab bulkheads plus some bits of plasticard of a rather complex 'I' shape that fit between the beams that stick out of the end of the Atlas chassis block and also form a floor for the cabs. A bolt can be inserted from underneath to hold everything together... maybe... I was hoping to avoid doing any metalwork on the chassis block, but it was not to be. The MP15 fuel tanks are too wide for a British loco. Removing the plastic moulding reduces the width, but the casting underneath is still too wide, so I had to dismantle the chassis and take a file to it. My original plan was simply to file the casting to the shape of the class 22 water tank... which I did. Once everything was back together I noticed a problem - the MP15 tank is not positioned centrally between the bogies, but offset towards the bonnet (hood?) end of the loco. I'm going to need to make an overlay for this or use the one from the kit... but the split frame construction means that I'll need to figure out some good insulation if I opt for a nickel silver tank. So another job not finished. The bogies (trucks?) have caused some head-scratching. I was (and probably still am) in two minds about how to tackle these. One option is to use the Worsley Works etched overlays, but it turns out that these are out of stock, so I'm going to need to wait a few weeks before getting my hands on these. The other option is to modify the MP15 trucks to look like class 22 bogies. The two actually have a lot in common so it may not be as daft as it sounds, but the Atlas trucks are made of a very springy plastic that seems to be difficult to persuade things to stick to. Anyway, whichever option I use in the end, a lot of detail needs to be removed from the Atlas trucks, so I've attacked them with files and burrs but kept the axleboxes and leaf springs for the time being. I don't yet know how the Worsley overlays will go together, but I'm expecting a few challenges at the ends of the bogies. The class 22 has some very prominent sandboxes that seem to be part of a quite obvious cross-member that goes right across the front (and back) of the bogie. Couplings are another challenge. The class 22 bogies stop a long way short of the buffer beams so the answer is not 100% obvious.. Sharp eyed readers may have spotted a DG tacked on in one of the photos in the previous posting. This was stuck temporarily to the underside of the cab floor as an experiment. Some tests propelling wagons through a crossover proved this to be a bad idea - even a loco as short as the class 22 is too long for this dodge... although Atlas get away with it but their buckeye couplings are sprung and can move from side to side. Attaching things to the ends of the Atlas trucks also turns out to be tricky because Atlas didn't intend anything to be attached here. The latest experiment involves a 'U' shaped plasticard overlay superglued to the side and ends of the inner frame of the truck. Onto this I've stuck a fabricated plasticard crossmember (and integral sandboxes) and an 8mm long 'tongue' onto which a DG has been stuck. Further experiments with the wagon and crossover have proved this to be a better way to mount the coupling. Until I've decided on how to do the sideframes the whole crossmember idea may neeed to change. Another job not finished. One final problem - having attached the crossmember and coupling to the bogie, I can't now get access to fit the screw that holds the body on. Doh! ... Re-think tme At least the wheels are back from Gordon and re-fitted to the loco. It runs very nicely, so at least there is some positive news to report.

I've been looking at these photos some more and checking the very sketchy info elsewhere. The sidings depicted seem to be north and south of the Foundry Lane level crossing and the works are Holmans No 3 Foundry. This was not the original terminus... and possibly not the terminus at all even at the time of the photo. Mr RA Cooke's plans say that Holman's bought the line North of MP 313.34 in 1970. I'm guessing that 313.34 was just North of the crossing where Maurice Dart's West Cornwall Mineral Railways book has a photo of some steel gates which you can also just about see in the second photo. According to Mr Cooke, the line by the dock was a short loop installed in 1966 which rejoined the branch before the level crossing. North of the crossing there was one siding to the right of the line and two to the left. The first photo tells quite a story really - steel ingots and either coal or coke sat on the loading dock with more ingots in the wagon. On the left are a couple of (con?)flats with compressors on them. My first assumption was that this was some sort of PW train but then I realised that the CompAir compressors are brand new and are probably the products manufactured by Holmans being dispatched by rail. As an aside, page 40 of 'Heyday of the Hydraulics shows D1039 at Paddington in 1970 with a big advert for Holmans compressors behind it. Ah... for the days when Britain had a manufacturing industry.

Thanks Matt - love the pics. Looks like the Roskear branch terminus would make another excellent micro layout. I've never seen a pic of the place other than an aerial photo before. Regards, Andy

Hmm... Turntable offset to one side... roundhouse on the other... add some Cornish class 37s... Guess where? Regards, Andy

Thanks Matt - glad to hear from another WR fan. I hope you manage to track those photos down because I can't recall ever having seen many pics of Drump Lane - the only one I can think of is in GWR days. I look forward to reading about your new layout in RMWeb soon! Regards, Andy

Trevor: Thanks. I've been modelling in 2mm for a long time so it doesn't really seem small to me. It does have its advantages in terms of being able to portray a bigger scene as we are doing with our group layout - St Ruth. For a bit of balance I also have some 16mm trains that appear occasionally in the garden. Pete: Yes, this is South Yard... which also doubles as my test track and parking location for incomplete models - it's more difficult to forget about them if they are on show all the time. Because it's so small I can't fit too many half finished things in so it encourages me to get on and finish stuff. I haven't forgotten that I've promised to post more about the layout... although you can see pretty much half of it in the photos. Regards, Andy

The body gains its buffer beams, valences and roof panels. ... and I promise to write about something else one day Buffer Beams As far as I can tell the method of assembly intended by the Worsley Works kit involves two false cab floors to be soldered to the main body and a separate chassis built around a floor unit with two cutouts, presumably for motor bogies. The floor unit and the cab floors have etched holes, so I guess that the idea is that they should be bolted together. The side valences are provided with tabs to locate into slots in this floor unit. This sort of construction is clearly not going to be suitable when using a Farish or Atlas 'N' gauge chassis. So where does that leave us? - the buffer beams and valence etchings seem to be a pretty reasonable representation of the prototype but without the etched floor from the kit there is not much to ensure correct alignment or to hold them in place with any real robustness. I did a quick trial using one buffer beam and one side valence just to see if I was being pessimistic, but found that I was struggling with lots of unwieldy bits that didn't want to stay in the right place for soldering so it was time for a bit of a rethink. The buffer beams are provided with four layers of overlay at each end where the buffers are mounted. I can't get a decent measurement from a drawing or photo to confirm this but 40 thou seems too thick to me and would leave the coupling hook and other things buried well underneath the nose. I therefore left two layers of overlay off. The end of the nose is 20 thou thick and its bottom edge sits 1mm lower than the bottom edge of the body sides. I therefore filed 1mm off the top of the outermost buffer beam overlay which has the dual benefit of providing a good vertical location for the buffer beam, more joint area to solder and ensuring that the outer face of the overlay sits just 10 thou behind the outer face of the nose. Assembling the buffer beams to the body still proved to be a pretty painful process. I wanted to use normal solder for this to give as much strength as possible, but this meant that the joints holding the various layers of the buffer beam together would come undone in the process. I only found a partial answer to this problem: I fitted the (N Brass LMS Oval) buffers to the buffer beams during assembly of the layers. This provides at least partial location for the various layers although everything is still free to rotate and separate when it gets hot again. The only answer to this was to keep trying and to remove and reassemble the buffer beam components after each failed attempt. Holding things in place and ensuring correct alignment was also difficult. My solution (see picture) was not very elegant but it worked - I clamped the buffer beam in a pin vice and clamped this in the vice so that the beam was held horizontal. I kept a square alongside so that I could align the body by eye. Heath Robinson would be proud. I used plenty of flux and plenty of solder on the tip of the iron to try to get heat into the joint as quickly as possible. I think that both ends took three attempts before I was happy with them. Ideally I would have liked to leave the buffers off until later in the assembly. This would have given me better access for tidying up the valence corners and detailing the ends but it was not to be. Side Valences Class 22s seem to have had a habit of losing parts of their valences in later life. The remaining valences could also be pretty wonky. Checking the photos of the real D6309 showed that it had a complete set of valences on one side which appeared to fit reasonably well. On the other side it was missing the centre valence and the remaining valences were sticking out noticeably. <edit> Oops - Forgot to mention in the original post that before fitting the valences I filed a slight radius onto the bottom of the loco sides as per the prototype. </edit> For the side with the complete set of valences I just used the etch provided in the kit after creating a couple of slight bends where the cab side sheets start to taper inwards. I found that by adjusting these bends I could just about get it to stay in place although there is very little overlap with the buffer beams. I then held one corner in place with blu-tack while I soldered the corner at the other end. After soldering the remaining corner I tacked the valence on to the bottom of the sides at several points along its length before cleaning up the solder that had crept into visible areas. On the other side I cut some strips of 5 thou nickel silver to represent the sticking out valences. These were made so that they had a decent overlap to solder inside the body but still stayed below the louvres. Fixing these involved some trial and error before the alignment was good enough, but there weren't any major problems. Finally I held my breath and cut the remaining side valence etch so that just the bits under the cabs could be fitted to the loco. These were then lined up and soldered in place, starting at the buffer beam end. There is practically no overlap to hold these in place so once they were tacked in place I added a small strengthening strip of 5 thou nickel silver behind the valences and sides just inboard of the cab doors. Fixing the Roof This was another nerve-wracking process but it went quite smoothly in the end. I held the overlay in place with a blob of blu-tack at each end and after carefully checking the alignment I drew around it with a CD marker pen. The body and overlay were then cleaned, fluxed and tinned all of the way around the edge of the overlay. After cleaning up any thick bits of solder, the overlay was then put back into place, held with blu-tack and checked again (twice) for alignment. Once the alignment was OK, I sweated two corners on the same side into place. I found that getting enough heat into the joint was tricky. The technique that I used was to run flux into the joint, paint flux onto the outside of the overlay and then put some solder onto the bit of the iron and immediately wipe it off on the sponge. This leaves a tiny residue of fresh solder on the bit which (with the help of the flux) is enough to transfer the heat into the joint without leaving a big unsightly blob afterwards. I pressed the overlay down using a small piece of card to (partially) insulate my finger. I still found that my finger got pretty hot though. Having done the first two corners and re-checked the alignment, I removed the blu-tack and made the joints in the centre of the cab roofs before doing the last two corners. Hopefully this sequence of doing things helped to avoid creating any wrinkles. Finally I sweated the two sides down, starting in the middle and then filling in the gaps. Once this was done I cleaned up any excess solder and then soldered the boiler vent and engine room panels into place in a similar way. I had made a new boiler vent panel because D6309 doesn't have this plated over. Next Steps The pictures below show the current state of play, albeit spoiled by the flash bouncing off the bare metal - it looks a lot better in real life. Note the China Clay wagon pressed into service to hold all of the fiddly bits that aren't yet on the loco. The loco has also gained some finescale wheelsets temporarily stolen from my Atlas GP7 while its own wheels get sent off to the 2mm Association wheel turning service. There is still a lot more to do - I'm currently working through a list of jobs that I need to complete before D6309 goes into the paint shop. Most of these are pretty mundane but necessary things like making a proper fixing between the body and the chassis.

Good idea - enjoy your beer. Andy

Oh dear! Time for a bit of stiff upper lip... character building... will make you feel so much better when it goes well... etc. etc. I'm sure you'll find a good solution... no shortage of ideas from your various readers. Regards, Andy

Hi Pete, Glad to see you persevering. A tip that I've found useful for clearing flangeways is to find an old, cheap jewellers screwdriver or similar with a tip roughly 1mm wide and grind half of the the end away to make a stepped shape. Check the longest part of the step with the calipers and grind it until its width is the same as the 2mm flangeway width. Then you have a tool that will scrape any crud from both the top and the side of the rail head as well as clearing the flangeway - much more effective than a piece of wet and dry for any cleaning up after painting or in your case plastering the rails. Regards, Andy

Yes - on two counts actually. One of not being able to paint things because fo stray PVA. The other of multi-layered ground surfaces flaking off. I noticed that a small white patch had appeared yesterday in the yard on South Yard because the top layer of my Polyfilla ground surface had decided to part company with the layer below. Nothing terminal - I can paint it and call it a pothole, but a bit annoying all the same.

I'm not sure how good this clay is at sticking to itself so sloshing some PVA around might help too - but don't get PVA anywhere that you want to use water based paints etc afterwards.

Hi Pete, We also got some cracking when using DAS on the St Ruth sea wall but nothing like the crazing that you have got. I'm guessing that it might be down to thickness (or lack of it) - our DAS is about 2-3mm thick. Our cracks are probably at the places where different slabs of DAS were butted up to each other... but we did use a lot of water to smooth things down here. It might also be down to the difference in thickness between and on top of the sleepers. Might I suggest making up some off-layout test pieces and experimenting there? Here's another inset track approach, but the bit between the rails may not translate to 2mm. The filler might be a useful option to consider though. http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php/blog/1/entry-44-inset-trackwork-on-keyhaven/

Thanks Pete. I am also much more used to working in plasticard, but that's on moulded plastic loco bodies. The headcode boxes are a pretty major piede of front end detail and the key to getting the position of all the other stuff correct so I didn't see much option other than to do them 'properly'. At the end of the day I probably spent a good deal more time drilling the handrail holes, so the metal headcode boxes feel like a reasonable investment of time. Don't forget that I've done a lot of filing, scraping and fettling before taking these photos so my soldering isn't that great. I get plenty of the stuff where I don't want it - more so as the size of the things being soldered gets smaller.

Progress continues on the class 22, but at a rather slower pace now that I'm working on the detailing of the nose ends. There's a lot to do here (and it still isn't finished) and it's definitely a place at which the Worsley Works scratch-aid kit becomes more scratch than aid. The Prototype The nose is another place on the class 22 where a lot of detail variations appear. I won't attempt to cover all of them here. The most obvious is the presence or absence of headcode boxes. These were not fitted to the earlier locos from new but were retro-fitted in the mid 1960s. This retro-fit also involved changes to the handrail arrangement, removal of the headcode disks (obviously), plating over some apertures and the addition of a few other appendages whose purpose is not readily apparent. The later locos had headcode boxes from new along with a different (and less cluttered) arrangement of handrails, lamp brackets and marker lights. As far as I can tell, all locos seem to have left the factory with a pair of single piece gangway doors on each end. The locos that had headcodes retrofitted also received two piece gangway doors evident by an extra (strip?) hinge which is not quite central on each of the doors. In addition to these main variations there are lots of detail differences on individual locos such as handrails being in slightly different positions, different bracket arrangements and so on, so again - get some good photos of your chosen loco. It is possible that some of these variations resulted from accident repairs, so I suppose that some locos may have had one end different from the other. And so to do battle with the model?... not quite… The Phoney War I've chosen one of the 'headcode retrofit' locos which means that neither of the two alternative ends provided by the kit had the correct layout of handrail holes. This meant that there would be a lot of holes to drill and bits to attach. I thought that it would be quite easy to mess this up and get holes or headcode boxes slightly out of place which would result in something that would look obviously wrong and be very difficult to rectify. To try to avoid this I decided to make a jig to help me to get the holes and the headcode boxes in the right (or at least a consistent) place. Before starting on the jig I took a look at the help provided in the kit for the nose detail, which is not a great deal - some detail is etched into the nose and there is also a set of etched headcode boxes. I tried the headcode boxes in place on the nose but quickly decided that they were too small and probably too thin as well. Their small size would also make it very difficult for me to finish the headcode boxes in the way I've done most of my other locos so they were consigned to the spares box. Having learned my lesson by having to junk my first attempt at the roof overlay I decided to draw the nose detail using CAD to get the positions and dimensions right. The dimensions were scaled from a photo and transferred to the CAD drawing. The drawing is not intended to be a prototype drawing but rather a drawing of the model as I intend it to be, taking into account the sizes of nickel silver strip that I had available and my ability to mark out and drill to a certain level of accuracy. Once the drawing was done it was printed out to the same size as the photo and overlaid onto the photo to check the position of the various items. After a few minor adjustments the drawing was printed off to 2mm scale and stuck with Pritt to the front of the loco. I was really pleased with how it looked - I just wished that creating it in three dimensions without messing it up would be so easy. I suppose I could have used the paper overlay as a template for marking out directly onto the ends of the loco but I was not confident that I could get the template accurately aligned with the etched detail nor could I see how this approach would help me with positioning the headcode boxes. The jig was made from a piece of 20 thou brass (obtained for free from Allen's stand at a show). It uses the bottom edge of the nose as a datum to ensure that it is in the correct place vertically. For horizontal alignment I used the centre line of the nose by aligning by eye with the joint in the gangway doors. These datum lines correspond to two edges of the jig and all of the marking out was done from these edges. The jig has a cutout to fix the position of the headcode box and 0.3mm holes for each of the handrail holes and the marker light. The holes in the jig are intended to be used just to fix the positions of the handrail holes - the real end is drilled through the jig just enough to start a hole. The remainder of the hole is drilled after the jig has been removed. Most of the end detail is symmetrical, so the jig only covers half of the nose. It is then simply turned over to do the other half. Once the jig had been cut out and drilled a piece of nickel silver strip was soldered across the bottom edge to act as a guide to keep it in the right place. I used a permanent marker to cover the whole jig in an attempt to prevent it from being accidentally soldered to the loco. I tested the jig on one of the spare ends from the kit. This showed that the basic idea worked and also showed up a small error - one of the handrail holes was too high so the horizontal handrail wasn't truly horizontal. I tried the jig again on the opposite side but this time used a piece of paper to space the jig away from the bottom of the end slightly while drilling the hole with the error. This fixed the error and also proved just how small an error was noticeable with such a short horizontal handrail. The photo below shows the jig (before the last modification) in place on the loco. And finally… The Model The real ends went much the same way as the test on the spare end except that it was a lot easier to keep the jig in position because I had a whole loco to hold instead of just a piece of 10 thou sheet. Drilling the handrail holes was still a pain. My mini drill and flexi drive won't grip a 0.3mm drill so it all had to be done by hand so drilling the 16 handrail holes took forever. The upper holes need to be drilled through a 40 thou sandwich of nickel silver with a constant fear of breaking the drill (note to self: file a cutout in the backing pieces next time). I kept the drill lubricated and removed it regularly to clearing the swarf. Nevertheless I still broke several drills while drilling the jig and the real loco. I'm quite pleased with the results so far. The accuracy is still not 100% perfect but I'm sure that it is a lot better than it would have been if I'd tried to mark everything out individually on the ends. I made the headcode boxes from a piece of 10 thou nickel silver (another freebie from Allen), drilling a hole and opening this out to make a rectangle of the right size for the headcode box window, checking regularly with the vernier callipers and a square. Then I filed the frame to size around three sides of the hole, using the other side as a 'handle' (see the pic below). Finally the box was cut off on the fourth side and cleaned up. This is a time consuming job and I found it required a lot of patience and care to get an accurate result. Even so, I think that my efforts are noticeably less accurate than etched components. I was quite careful while attaching the headcodes. First I tinned the back of the headcode and brushed the surface of the nose with Green Label flux. Then I put the jig into place and put the headcode box into the jig. I soldered just the free (outer) edge of the headcode box to the nose first with minimal (almost no) extra solder. Sometimes this took several attempts - it's quite easy to get a dry joint because there may not be enough heat going into the nose itself. Once the outer edge of both headcode boxes were attached and both checked for position I put the jig back on but moved it across to allow easier access to solder the inner edge of the headcode box. Once this was fixed I revisited the outer edge with more flux and a little more solder to ensure a good joint. Finally both boxes were checked by pulling them hard with tweezers to ensure that they were firmly fixed. I've found that once properly fixed these are very difficult indeed to shift - in some cases I wanted to move the boxes across slightly but I had to give up because I just couldn't unsolder them. Even unsoldering the headcode boxes after attaching them to the spare ends was quite difficult. While attaching the headcode boxes I discovered another little error creeping in - even though I was very careful in aligning the jig to the etched centre line of the doors I still found that one headcode box was further out than the other. At first I thought this was just my mistake in aligning the jig but I had the same problem on the second end and I was sure that I had aligned the jig correctly. In the end I needed to deliberately move the jig across very slightly to correct this error. I still don't know where this error has come from. After soldering the boxes into place on the second end guided by the jig I was not totally happy with how they looked - somehow they just seemed too close together even though the calipers didn't show any significant difference from the other end. I tried to unsolder them and adjust them but they wouldn't budge - the end of the loco is a very efficient heat sink. The next day I still wasn't any happier about the way they looked so there was only one job on the agenda - they were coming off no matter what. In the end I shifted them by adding extra solder inside the headcode boxes to allow more heat to be conducted onto the end from the iron. I also clamped a heat sink to the cab side in an attempt to reduce the risk of unsoldering the corner of the loco. I needn't have worried because I could actually see how much of it was hot enough to melt the solder - just a tiny circular area around the iron. Anyway I got both boxes off without bending them too much and then cleaned the extra solder off the end. I then decided to modify the jig by making a small cutout below the inner bottom corner of the headcode box. This allowed me to see part of the etched oval line on the nose which turned out to be a better way to find the position of the headcode box. In the end I positioned the boxes so that they fully overlap the oval with about half the width of the etched line to spare. After removing the jig I was a lot happier with the result. I re-checked the other end and decided that I was still happy with it so didn't attempt any further adjustments The circular openings near the top of the nose were made more three dimensional by making a couple of rings of fuse wire to fit into the etched circle. I found that coiling the wire round a 0.6mm drill was about right for this. These were attached with solder paste - not something that I like using because it always seems to fizz and leave a general mess to clean up, which is exactly what happened. Lines to represent the extra fold in the gangway doors were scribed (carefully) with the craft knife. I don't know if this will be visible after painting - I'll have to wait and see. The marker lights were drilled to 0.6mm and fuse wire rings soldered into place. These were then opened out slightly with a 0.75mm drill and lightly filed back. They should have a different appearance from the holes at the top of the nose even though they are made in more or less the same way. I'm not sure that this really worked - they still look pretty similar to me. On the other end I used a 0.5mm drill to make the rings and just cleaned the holes out back to 0.5mm after soldering. These seem to give a slightly better result. That does mean that my two ends are slightly different now but who can look at both ends of a loco at the same time? I haven't yet added the remaining details to the nose ends because some of them will probably be quite vulnerable while I'm still building the loco. I have made a few sample handrails and brackets just to check things out. Positioning and holding some of them for fixing may prove to be a challenge. Here is a picture of progress so far. I hadn't intended to attach the handrails yet but while soldering the brackets this one decided to stay put. The photo has also shown me a few bits of stray solder that still need to be cleaned up. Try not to look at the 'N' gauge wheels - they aren't staying. This is still an ongoing story -I need to make the holes in the headcode boxes go the rest of the way through the nose so that they can be backlit (one day). I haven't yet done all of the work on the other end of the loco and I also will need to come back again at a later stage to attach all of the more fragile bits and bobs. I'm hoping that the valences will be rather more straightforward and that I can actually use the bits provided by the kit.

80s music is fine - they were my formative years but I think you need to be careful about what you might start. Now St Ruth is set in the 60s... just off to find some Beatles or Rolling Stones lyrics for my next posting... or maybe some Woodstock era stuff...

Yep - been there, done that. I used a 4 megapixel camera for a lot of my family history research - including some stuff dating back to the 15th century. Prior to this I had a brief try with a 2 megapixel camera but the results were not very usable.

OK, so 'lack of' was oversimplifying the situation but as far as I can tell the NRM holds a lot of stuff in its archive that has not been catalogued in a way which is searchable on the Internet - including holdings (if any) of WR operating documents from the 1960s. I guess it depends on the specific institution, but to me a 'library' and an 'archive' are different things - a library contains mostly published works whereas an archive contains mainly original documents, plans, photographs, manuscripts etc. The catalogue on the York University web site is for the NRM library rather than its archive - i.e. mainly books rather than original documents. The NRM does have some of its archive collection searchable via the excellent A2A site at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/ but again I get the impression that only a small fraction of their holdings are actually visible this way - as a quick test their web site tells us that they hold 87 drawings from the S&DJR Highbridge Works but searching for 'Highbridge' within the NRM on A2A turns up nothing. Searching for 'timetable' turns up a few things but nothing of real relevance. I guess that there is hope that this material may appear on one of these two existing online catalogues or on a completely new catalogue at some time in the future but until then contemplating a trip to York would be a very speculative venture for me.

The model is looking good Pete. Not sure about the 80s lyrics though. Have you decided how you are going to paint all those stones?

A day off from the class 22 (and work too)… Ever since I first decided on my chosen region and period I have been on the lookout for decent information about how the real thing was actually operated at that time. Unfortunately documents like working timetables for this period have never surfaced during my visits to places that sell these things and even now that we have the Internet they don't seem to appear very often. With the creation of St Ruth (which is in my region and set in a very similar period) I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and try to get hold of the information that I wanted. The National Archives in Kew (formerly called the PRO) has copies of WR working timetables and, having a few holiday days that I needed to use up before I lost them, I decided to take a day off and head down there. This isn't the first time that I've been to TNA - I went several times a few years back doing family history research. They have made a few changes since I was last there - notably opening up some quite big areas for people who don't need to look at original documents. The other change that I really liked was that they have introduced some reading desks equipped with camera stands to help people like me who want to take digital photos of documents. This is a huge step forward because you aren't allowed to use flash so holding the camera by hand is quite a good way to get blurry images apart from the fact that it's difficult to hold the camera and try to hold something like a working timetable nice and flat at the same time. With the aid of the new camera stands I was able to photograph the Working Timetables for Devon and Cornwall for 1965, 67 and 1970 plus a few other things in the space of a single visit - way more than I was expecting. I can't claim that it was much fun - turning pages over and pressing the shutter release over and over can soon get pretty tedious and cause some interesting aches but when you remember that not so very long ago a notepad and pencil was the only way to take information out of there then you realise just how far we've come. For anyone interested, my camera is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ6 model (12 megapixels) used in Macro mode and locked to 80 ISO with the flash switched off. I turned the photo resolution down to 3 megapixels after experimenting to see what size had an acceptable level of quality without using too much space. The battery was fully charged before I went and had perhaps 30 minutes on charge while I was there but it was down to a single bar by the end of the day. In total I took 1,118 photos which took 1.69Gb of disk space - more photos than my camera had taken since I had it for Christmas over a year ago. If you've never been to the National Archives and would like to go then I can assure you that it's not too scary. Do be careful to check which forms of ID they require before you go otherwise you may find that you have a wasted trip. If you are planning to photograph documents then be sure to check your results while you are there (this is what I was doing while the camera battery was on charge) and have chance to have another try if there are any problems - you don't want to get home and find you have taken hundreds of blurry photos. According to an article in a recent MRJ it may also be possible to track down other useful info like carriage working instructions (which would tell us how passenger trains were made up). As far as I can tell the National Archives don't have these. They might be held at York but unfortunately York don't seem to have a catalogue for their archives that is searchable on the Internet and it would be a bit of a trek for me to make without some clear idea that they actually have something that I need. A few samples below. Working 1M99 is one that interests me - in the mid 60s this was the 13:05 Penzance-Liverpool and carried mail. There is a photo in the 'BR WR in colour' book that shows this train near Starcross with a maroon warship, a TPO coach and two vans followed by a bunch of blue/grey coaches... a perfect excuse for me to run my nice new red Farish TPO without having to build the whole Great Western TPO formation. By the 1969 WTT it started from Plymouth at 16:15 and by 1970 it seems to have disappeared from the WTT.

Nice loco. There's ample precedent for unique NG industrial locos and so plenty of room to be creative. Glad to see that you give in to distractions from time to time - but this one seems to have been over in a flash - I'm sure that it hadn't been painted when I looked earlier . Perhaps you need a narrow gauge connection to a new industry - the Highclere Jam Butty Factory perhaps?

@Matt: Thanks. I'm glad that my postings have sparked your enthusiasm. I ordered the MP15DC on eBay from Garden State Models but I don't think that this shop have any MP15s listed just now. It cost me about 100 dollars including postage which at the time worked out to about 65 of our pounds. I did try to find one in the UK at Osborns Models of Bideford but all of their non-DCC ones are out of stock. They do have a DCC fitted example for £83.74, so if you want DCC then that might be a good bet - you would probably get it delivered without such a nail-biting long wait. A couple of days ago I also found a company called Model Junction in Slough that seems to stock a lot of Atlas stuff but their prices seem to be rather higher than Osborns for the MP15. @Trevor: Thanks very much for the photos especially the one of D6309 showing the boiler vent. It looks like I'll be building my first choice loco now (and probably ordering a nice print of that photo at St Blazey to go with it), so I can save deliberations about any oddness on D6323 for another time.

Thanks everyone. @Trevor: I hadn't noticed anything odd about D6323 but I will take a closer look at the photos - trouble is that none of them is particularly good because all are taken from some distance away or in poor lighting conditions (or both). I'm still hopeful of doing D6309 instead and D6315 also seems like a possibility - all withdrawn in green and known to appear in Cornwall. I have ordered some photos from Exe Rail who seem to have better coverage of the Devon and Cornwall class 22s, so hopefully these will help me to make the final decision. @Pete: Yes I've been impressed with the Atlas stuff that I've had in the past. Shame that the inside of an MP15 is too small for flywheels which would make it even better. The valances are included in the kit but I haven't fitted them yet. There is an etched overlay available for the bogies (and you can now buy the kit with this included for a few pounds extra), but I bought my kit a couple of years ago, so I don't have the bogie overlays just now.

I keep thinking that there are no more class 22 photos to be found on the Internet. I keep being proved wrong. Maybe I should post a list of everything I've found or been sent... but maybe that would spoil the fun for somebody else. Thanks!

It Lives! This is a quick update with some good news about my class 22 - this afternoon postman brought me an Atlas MP15DC that will provide the chassis for the class 22. It had taken about 5 weeks to arrive from New Jersey. I was rather beginning to think that it was never going to arrive and wishing that I'd just found a nice Farish class 20 like everybody else does. Naturally, being a patient sort of chap, after a fairly cursory test to make sure that it wasn't dead, the body was off and the class 22 body was plonked on top for a test run. Of course being of split frame construction this immediately resulted in a short circuit... The solution came in the form of two pieces of paper swiftly cut out and stuck with Pritt to the ends of the chassis where the class 22 bulkheads rest on it - success! The class 22 can now move under its own power, albeit on 'N' gauge wheels. Initial impressions are that the chassis fits very well indeed, the bogie wheelbase is spot on and as far as I can tell the bogie centres are within 1mm of what they should be for a class 22. The ride height is also not a million miles from where it needs to be and should be easy to adjust by shaving a little off the bottom edges of the bulkheads. Here are a couple of photos of the class 22 on its new chassis alongside the unfortunate MP15 - only arrived today and already I've nicked its chassis. Finally, a little 'how to' by somebody else with a very neat trick for removing the chassis from an Americal loco without damaging it... 'Institute of Model Railroad Operations' eh? - impressive! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJw8lU4zN9k