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Purchased, reviewed and photographed by Graeme Lewis

I bought two of these just prior to Christmas 2022 and built them simultaneously. It would have been smarter to build one first and then do the next one.

The kit comes nicely packaged, but the first surprise is no instructions. You are directed to the Dapol website, where there is a download available. Kitmaster TechnicalThe second surprise is that the instructions are 46 pages long (!) and apart from the introduction, the instructions are all pictures. I downloaded the manual and referred to it on my laptop from time to time – but there were a couple of occasions when I thought a few words would have given me some assurance. You do need to study the pictures very carefully to avoid getting some parts the wrong way around.

For some reason I thought the kit was laser-cut in MDF but it is actually high quality card. I like scratch building in card but have never got on with card kits – just a personality defect, I guess. That aside, my next surprise was both the quality and the number of laser-cut items. The laser cutting is very finely done, but to my mind it has been taken too far. The best – or should I say the worst - example of this is the handrailing where several components are very fine. Simply removing the parts damaged a couple of these.

There are some plastic components for guttering, finials, some of the roof flashing, down pipes and fire buckets. Dapol state the box is based on that at Ais Gill. I believe this is the box now at Butterley called “Butterley GF”. Dapol have captured the colour of that box well, but the colours aren’t correct for my MR period. I simply sprayed painted all the parts before assembly. A few observations are:

The kit went together well and is well thought out, but the tolerances are so small that fitting components did require some fettling – maybe painting the parts affected the fit. I had some issues with the corners of one box that required quite a lot of work to get right. The corner posts were actually signal posts and should taper. This isn’t captured by Dapol and I don’t blame them for that!

I didn’t use the downpipes supplied which were quite poor – they certainly aren’t circular. Unlike the old Prototype Models kit the prominent bolts aren’t provided, nor is the stove pipe chimney. These can be added easily enough, along with the signage and new downpipes. There are no internal details provided apart from the printed wall colours. Fire buckets are included and are a nice touch.

I had hoped to customise the boxes by changing the hand of the box. However, if you reverse the ends the door is towards the front of the box, rather than the back. This could be modified but maybe Dapol could modify the components to make this easier to do, which I think would broaden the kit’s appeal.

The photos show the box with the platform and, apart from the roof and lack of downpipes, is as per the kit. Overall, I am pleased with the resulting models and, once further detailed and weathered, they will be useful additions to my Kensington Midland layout. I would recommend the kit to anyone requiring a 1½ flake type 2A MR box – just be careful removing the parts from the box and be very careful lining up the various parts.

We showed this to Dapol and the kit’s designer kindly responded as follows.

Thank you for your review, it’s the first one I’ve read of one of my new kits and I’m glad the reviewer is pleased with it, despite a few difficulties. A response to their observations:

1. I used a reference photo of the prototype, where the some of the rear vertical planks continued to floor level, but not all of them.
2. The kit has been made to the condition it was in BR days as that’s the most popular era for modellers.
3. I’ve taken the slate sizing from photos during BR days, hence the larger tiles. The flashing was added to make the kit look neater. I’ll make changes to extend the roof tiles for future batches, so people don’t have to use the flashing if they don’t want to.
4. The handrails were always going to be very difficult to make due to their small size. We did look at using wire or plastic, but decided that card was the better option.
5. The smaller signal box was based on a crossing box. It’s been described as suitable for platform mounting due to the smaller size.

One thing that I personally prefer about card kits is that they are easier to modify compared to plastic or wood, maybe that’s just me.I think what we provide is a decent model and people who want to change theirs, whether to improve it or personalise it, can do. I’m one of those people who always have to either modify or paint something when it comes out the box, as I like to make it my own.

One of the original intentions for the kits was for them to be self-coloured. We can’t specify specific colour codes to our supplier, but we do have a range of about 50 or so different colours to pick from, so we try our best to choose the most suitable. At the moment we use two standard card thicknesses, however we have been exploring other textured card that we may use in the future.

These kits aren’t designed for beginners, especially not the larger ones. We have a few smaller ones releasing shortly, which will lend themselves more to people who aren’t confident or don’t have as much kit building experience.

The plastic parts are a mix of 3D printing and injection moulding, as some parts lend themselves better to different processes. The tool for the signal boxes was one of, if not the first inhouse tool made in our new tool room ,so the quality will improve over time. These are the first in a range of kits so there were bound to be some opportunities for improvement, as this is something completely new to us. Continual review and improvement is something we always do at Dapol. There are already features in the next batch that should make the future kits easier and more enjoyable to build.