I'm sure many of you have a favourite locomotive type that as modellers you keep coming back to, or collect perhaps a little bit too much? Having spent all day today on a Z gauge painting and lining marathon on some models of these I thought I might share with you my own long standing relationship with the Southern railway's Merchant Navies and West Country class 4-6-2s. Forgive me if it starts out as a bit of a ramble but it will give you an idea why I find these idiosyncratic machines so fascinating. Designed by the maverick Southern Railway engineer O.V Bulleid and introduced in 1941 their air smoothed casing, BFB wheels, chain driven valve gear and thermic syphons in the boiler were a massive culture shock to the railwaymen of the Southern (ours, not the USA one!). The valve gear ran in an oil bath which was prone to leaking and they had a habit of slipping quite badly but the boiler was a free steaming brute that generated immense sustained power. They became affectionately known as 'Spamcans' for the obvious reason. In 1945 a lighter version the 'West Country/Battle of Britain' class was introduced. 34086 '219 Squadron' British railways had little time for many of the features of this fleet and began an extensive rebuilding program with conventional valve gear and the removal of the streamlining The preserved 34027 'Taw Valley' on a positioning train at Meadowhall near Sheffield As a Yorkshire lad born and bred we lived nowhere near the home ground of these machines that principally worked the lines south of London from Kent all the way to Cornwall so I never got to see many until we went of a family camping holiday to the New Forest in 1965 . My mother's famous words to my dad " I hope there are no railways involved this time?" were followed by a trail of steam coming out of a cutting behind the camp site! 35017 'Belgian Marine' in the cutting behind the camp site. You can see how they retained their oval smokebox doors after rebuilding Remarkably no les than twenty Light Pacifics have survived, ten streamlined and ten rebuilt and eleven Merchant Navys. This was due to the Woodhams, Barry Island scrapyard concentrating on cutting wagons and leaving the steam locos intact for preservation groups to acquire them. 35022 'Holland and America Line' waits to be resued from Dai Woodhams in 1979 to be continued Kev
Many of the parts of 34046 'Braunton' had been removed for safe keeping in this 1982 shot Now in the U.K these two classes of locos have always been well represented in model form. Triang, later Triang-Hornby, made them in both 00 gauge and TT way back in the 1960s and Kitmaster (absorbed by Airfix) did an injected moulded 00 construction kit at a very reasonable price. Wrenn models, who carried on making the original Hornby Dublo metal loco models, introduced new tooling of a rebuilt Bulleid Pacific. Grafar and Dapol have both produced N scale versions. Airfix kits were everywhere back in those days. Most newsagents and every model shop used to stock them and the Bulleid Pacific kit represented Battle of Britain class 'Biggin Hill' So one of my first ever kitbashing projects as a youngster was to motorise one with a old Triang Princess class 4-6-2 chassis. To represent the BFB wheels you had to go to a guy called Albert Goodall who did etched BFB overlays to glue onto the front of the wheels to hide the spokes. He also did the nameplates as well. For those British members of this forum who will remember this I had to send a Postal order for the right amount. Back in those days, long before credit cards or paypal it was a sort of prepaid cheque issued by the local post office, Another time, long gone! It ran for years and is seen her in the company of some 00 locos I built afterwards. Some kitbashed Triang but mainly white metal kits. How crude these look compared to modern 00 In a rare shot of my bedroom ( Yes really) when I still lived with the folks is the wall of British 00, American H0 and to the left the start of my ascent into 0 gauge. on the bench is a Rivarossi IHB 0-8-0 kit under construction and on the shelves you can see two of the motorised 00 Airfix Spamcans complete with nameplates. I would have been about seventeen at the time and was just about to discover cars, beer and girls! I never got around to doing one in 0 but jump forward a few years and I scratchbuilt 34074 46 Squadron in gauge 1. Coming up, the Z ones Kev
It is only recently that British Z has emerged as a viable thing with the advent of 3D printing but there has been the possibility of motorising some of the Atlas edition static models produced by D'agostini. One such is the 'Green Arrow' set with a Bulleid Pacific in original Southern malachite green and a couple of Pullmans. Numbered as 21C110 in the Southern's strange numbering system it has the headboard and ceremonial Gold arrows attached to it. It became 34010 'Sidmouth' after nationalisation. It is nicely moulded and you can pick them up on ebay quite cheaply and motorise them with the Marklin Bavarian pacific chassis. There is loads of room inside the air smoothed casing to add additional weight to improve traction. The only disadvantage is that as yet there is no obvious way of representing the unique wheel centres. As purchased Fitted with a green wheeled Bavarian chassis. The tender is running on Fox valley 36" wheels To be continued Kev
Although the Atlas editions Bulleids are fairly plentiful Ivan Industries introduced a 3D printed unrebuilt one on Shapeways whoch again was easily fitted with the Marklin chassis test fit on the chassis before cleaning up and painting Like the Atlas one there is bags of room for extra weight. The tender takes Marklin wheelsets and has had some slabs of brass added to increase mass. you can see one of the prototype magnetic couplers on the rear Now I rushed the paint job on this one as I wanted to run it at Zedex that year and was never really satisfied with the finish. Because the sides taper inwards towards the top there are some fine layer lines which I did not sand out . The paint really highlights them on this shot of it running on Shasta more soon Kev
Looks good Kev. Regarding your older underdetailed white metal kits, how hard would it be to pick one and superdetail it with each and every detail you can see in any photos you have. Strip and fine sand any rough spots, detail and take them one at a time to the next level to display in your collection? Metal kits are getting very rare these days.
recently Ivan introduced a 3D print of the rebuilt Merchant Navy. This is one of the best prints I've ever seen and just needed some cleaning up on the underside of the boiler. he has modified the tender to represent the cut down sides British Rail did to improve the rearwards vision. it is seen here with Charly McGuiness's newly introduced Class 158 DMU and his Class 76 DC Woodhead electric So no shortage of projects then! But the thrust of the last couple of weeks has been to blitz no less than five assorted Bulleids. The first thing was to pore over many of the photographs I have taken to see what compromises I need to do to finish them. Photos like this one of 34051 'Sir Winston Churchill' preserved at the National Railway Museum's site at Shildon let me judge where I needed to move the lining to get the nameplates to fit. This loco was famous for hauling the great man's funeral train after he passed. The van behind is a reproduction of the one that carried his coffin during his state funeral The nameplate and crest are attached directly to the cladding. However when BR rebuilt them they has a problem and had to resort to a backing plate to fix the plates to. I'm going to have the same problem more soon Kev
Well Robert these are long gone. A few years later I had some commisions to build some of these but already the quality of the kits had improved dramatically. The big issues with these early ones were they were quite crude and things like the cabsides were cast really thick. You also used to get the two halves of the boilers not fitting together or in the worst case, and I'm not going to mention any culprits, some of the boilers were oval. Serious 00 modellers used to make beautiful models from these that ran well but the hobby moved on. More and more etched parts came in and the dubious Triang and Hornby donor chassis were replaced with scale etched ones with etched valve gear. All etched kits with just a few casting took over and recently hybrid kits using 3D printing, resin casting and photo-etched brass or Nickel Silver represent nearly every obscure loco that ever ran on British rails. The other thing that killed them off was the explosion of RTR models of many of these locos Some kits are really sought after. DJH made some magnifcent kits of South African Garrets, Pacifics and 4-8-2s including the mighty N25s with the condensing tenders. If I ever seen any of these at a show I'm having them This shows the problems. This was a model of a North british Railway 'Glen class' 4-4-0 finished in LNER Apple green You can see the thickness of the coal rails etc but I was still quite pleased with it back in the day. With all the weight of the body it couldn't half pull! Talking of weight and pulling power, in the loft I still have an All-Nations 0 scale 4-6-0 that is in danger of coming through the ceiling it is so heavy! Must get round to doing something with it one day Kev
I just have a soft spot for metal models, etched, cast, pressed, etc. It just always seemed metal was better than wood, wood than plastic, plastic than resin, resin than paper as a hierarchy.
I agree. But there were some stinkers though. A firm in Ireland called Leinster models did some truly awful 0 scale loco kits in pressed tinplate and white metal but the prize for the worst was my mate Colin Massingham who used to trade as MTK kits in 00 and El-Crappo kits in 0. The O scale kits even had a drawing of a donkey having a crap on the box but people didn't get the hint. Colin sadly passed years ago after he contracted asbestosis stripping out a main line diesel he had bought to preserve but I have one abiding memory of him and his kits from many years ago. We were sat in the bar at the big Wigan Model railway show enjoying a pint of Pendle Witches brew on the Saturday when an irate modeller arrived to confront Colin brandishing a boxed kit of a Class 158 DMU. "Here, I bought this kit off you yesterday and it doesn't fit together!" Cool as 'Cool hand Luke' Colin politely said " I said it was a kit, I never promised it would fit together" Kev
Next I decided to do a simple repaint of the Atlas one in British rail Brunswick green and retain the Golden arrow paraphernalia. I say simple because the orange/black/orange lining is in straight lines only. I have had to make a big compromise with the nameplates as there are obviously no Z scale nameplates avaiable at present so I have used N ones which I know are too big but look O.K to me. This one had a milled brass tender chassis made and again runs on FVM wheels. Finished as 35017 'Belgian Marine'. The arrow is moulded so shallow that it was a real pain to to paint gold again the paint is Hycote aerosol Rover Brooklands green which is perfect for the BR brunswick green, lurking in the background is the rebuilt Merchant Navy. What is holding me up now is waiting for some cream 'Gill light' numbers to arrive to do the cabside numbers. Forgot to order them when I ordered the plates! Probably the loco I am most connected to is 'Taw Valley' Some notable encounters include February 1994 when it was due through on an excursion. I rang my mate Tony and said I'll meet you at the 'Dore junction' a real ale pub situated in the former Dore and Totley station and noted for a very nice pint of Timothy Taylor's Landlord pale ale. It was snowing a little bit and the forecast wan't great so I sent the darkroom staff home and closed the office and went to play trains. And it kept on snowing and there was no sign of the train. But we stuck with it as it snowed more and the normal passenger service trains started getting disrupted. Finally The other event that sticks in my mind, apart from a footplate ride on it on the main line was photographing it being prepped in the Haworth yard of the Keighley and Worth valley in 1992 Cleaning out the smokebox through the distinctive oval door it was then switched over to one of the other tracks and as it was reversing there was an almighty clang. They had managed to run over the stop blocks and there followed a parade of what seemed like everybody crouching down to look at it and offer an opinion To be continued Kev
So finally finished the painting and lettering on no less than four z gauge Bulleid pacifics. As they are Southern region locos the numbers always start with 3 and I had a near disaster when doing the last cabside. I dropped the last number 3 off the sheet onto the carpet. This was already covered with the tiny backing pieces of paper off all the previous numbers and it took ages to sweep them up and sort through them to find it. All four locos were painted in Hycote Rover Brooklands Green, Numbers, Lining and nameplates all came from Fox transfers in Leicester So in no particular order 35017 'Belgian marine' (Still with the boat train arrows on.) 34018 'Axminster' Ivan industries on Shapeways I've done something slightly different with the rebuilt Merchant Navy. On that family holiday in the 1960s we found a rather tatty 34056 'Croydon' relegated to putting together a ballast train at Templecombe. Fortunate to still have its nampleates intact when this picture was taken You'll have noticed by now on some of the pictures the distinctive head code discs. These two, one above the other indicate it is a ballast train or through goods more soons
Still deciding if it is feasible to add the discs but here is the rebuilt Merchant Navy 35020 'Bibby Line' on a goods train. Still neeeds top coat of lacquer and all four locos need the cab glazing adding last 34066 'Spitfire'. One of the problems doing the Battle of Britain named ones is there are so many evocative names you can choose, I was tempted with 'Fighter Command, Winston Churchill, Hurricane or any of the famous squadrons that fought in the Ariel battle that saved Great Britain from the nazi invasion in the second world war and finally, the most poignant picture. 34051 'Winston Churchill' pulling the funeral train in 30th of January 1965 from London Waterloo to Oxfordshire Kev Coming soon, sigh, no less than three LNER Pacifics and none of them are 'Flying Scotsman'
Nearly forgot the best picture. In the 1960's the author Doug Doherty asked my Dad if he could use some of hie photos for a book called 'Railscene Sheffield'. Now Dad didn't particularly want paying but Doug gave him this rare 'West Country Class' scroll which has passed down to me. It is a British Rail cast replacement one (Solid backed not hollow) and it came of 34018 'Axminster' and is one of my most treasued possessions. Original condition and unrestored
Took a bit of finding but I knew I had put a video of 35005 Canadian Pacific on youtbe somewhere. I did, eleven years ago If we get any steam running at al this summer these are the locos I'm going to chase Kev
