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Source: Gazette - August 2014 (Vol 19 No.4) Introduction

The charm of secondary lines in the early nineteen sixties is that ancient passenger vehicles still hung on to provide the services for a while, before they were all swept away as DMUs and the Mark 1 coach building programme progressed. To stock the line based on the Great Northern Railway’s Derbyshire extension, that I hope to build, it was clear that some Gresley 51 foot noncorridor coaches would be required. The well-known range of 7mm scale modular kits is available from Ian Kirk. The coach sides are made up from standard door and window components.

After some research, I decided to use a variety of parts, comprising the Kirk body parts, united with Newbold underframes and Just Like The Real Thing bogies. Sidelines components would be used for the underframe fittings and the seats. This was going to be an ‘All Nations’ project. The three vehicles I would be building would be a Diagram 65 Brake Third, Diagram 57 Third and a Diagram 129 Full Brake. I elected to build the coaches with the roof fixed to the sides. This five sided box would then trap the separate interior, with its floor, seats and partitions, to the underframe. For reference I used the Michael Harris books, LNER Standard Carriages and LNER Carriages. These are very good research aids, full of useful information.

Bodyshell

The coach ends incorporate the buffer beams, and these needed to be cut off as I was using brass underframes. There was a faint moulding line about 2mm below the lower beading edge and I cut along there with the razor saw. The full brake and the brake end are narrower than the normal coach as they are 8ft 6in in width instead of 9ft, so the equivalent of 3 inches had to be removed from each side of those ends.

That’s where my 7mm scale rule came in useful. It is also necessary to cut the two windows in the brake end of the Brake Third. This was done by drilling four small holes in each corner and using a piercing saw to join them up. Some beading for the outside of these was added with some plastic strip.

One way to strengthen the sides would be to add a continuous strip of Plastikard along the sides inside below window level, but I didn’t do that. What I did was glue in the centre partition in the compartment coach and a couple of stretchers in the full brake to prevent the sides from squeezing in too much during handling. The brake third was made up as two separate assemblies for the compartment section and the brake. To fit the roofs I placed the side and end assemblies into the upturned roofs to work out how much to cut off. It’s always best to be cautious and not remove too much. The excess at the ends was cut off with the trusty razor saw and the gutter trimmed with a sharp craft knife. I overdid it on one coach and had to re-instate it with some Slaters plastic strip. What did I say about being cautious? It’s always useful to keep a variety of this strip in stock, ready for any occasion, including overzealous cutting.

The roof is designed to glue on to the top of the sides as a butt join, so to eliminate the chance of any gaps, and draughts on the passengers, I cemented a strip along the inside of the coach above the top of the windows. This also created a rebate that would help align the roof and keep it in place. The roof was fixed on after Sidelines ventilators and rainstrips and destination brackets made from that ever useful plasticard strip had been added. There were a few gaps between the tops of the end mouldings and the underside of the carriage roof. I filled those with some cellulose filler although that is not really advisable of course as it sometimes reacts with the plastic surface.

After this, I fitted the Laurie Griffin commode handles and retained them with Zap CA. Originally, I was going to leave the moulded door handles.

Floor and interior

The interior floor was made up from thick (1.6mm) Plastikard, as were the many compartment partitions. The seating was cut from Sidelines mouldings. The floor is retained in place at each end by a brass ‘U’ shape bracket that fits in the end of the coach. This is glued to a 20mm wide plasticard stretcher with Evostik. 8BA nuts are soldered inside this bracket and this assembly holds the body onto the underframe and also serves to clamp the floor in place. The seats seemed a little low, so I measured the first class carriage seat, complete with luggage racks and mirror, that I have set up in my study, and decided to add some plastic strip to the bottom of each to raise them up a little.

About the last thing I added to the body was the Laurie Griffin lamp irons, two on the end of each coach.

Chassis The Kirk kits come with a plastic chassis, that, I’m sure is adequate, but my own personal taste is for a brass underframe.

Newbold models produce versions suitable for truss rod or turnbuckle versions of the underframes. All three vehicles in my project are turnbuckle versions. The etches follow a pretty standard design for this sort of thing – fold up solebars with overlays and cut outs and markings for the various underfloor fittings.

The first job was to use a big file and remove any etching cusps that would be visible, i.e. the outer edge of the solebar flange. After this, the hardest part was to fold up the lower flange of the solebar. It’s very narrow and my homemade bending bars struggled to grip it. Some judicious work with some smooth jawed pliers saw the remaining portions folded up. I eventually managed to get rid of the worse wiggles by going back over it with the pliers a few times to get it all straight. Finding the etches nicely designed, I basically followed the instructions. They fold up neatly and everything fits, the etched battery box goes together particularly well. The queen posts are created by laminating several layers of etchings and the threaded posts that fit into them and support the truss rods ate up my stock of 14BA nuts – 8 for each coach.

One minor issue that I found was that the slots and tabs didn’t quite match for one of the queen posts but this was easily rectified with a file.

I decided to use Sidelines castings for the underframe fittings, vac cylinder, dynamo, buffers and hose connections. They were all soldered into place with 145 degree solder. I was in a bit of a dilemma here, when my coaches eventually reside on my railway, it would look better to have the hoses connected, but whist being shown off and visiting other lines, it’s easier to have them frozen in place as if the vehicle is standing in a siding idle. I don’t know, so I took the male prerogative to take the easy road and hope for the best. They are frozen in place… I can always change them later.

The underframe instructions suggest using O gauge PCB sleeper strip for the step boards and annoyingly these coaches have step boards everywhere. The strip I obtained was double sided and seemed a little too thick, so I carefully split them in half with a Stanley knife. I used a big file again to round off the outer edge and corners. The underframe etch provides etched brackets to support them. One has to be careful here. The half etch for the fold can be very weak and step board once in place can easily just fold up when gripped, as they are the first things that the pinkies come in touch with when picking up the coach.

To reinforce them, I drilled 0.6mm holes into the solebar below a number of the brackets and soldered in brass wire supports to make the whole assembly more robust. When filed down slightly they are quite discrete. The full brake vehicle differed in that it had separate sets of boards under the doors rather than a continuous one running the full length of the coach, so wire supports were added for all of those.

The Sidelines cast buffers were cleaned up in the mini drill. A cross hole was drilled and a brass wire L soldered into place. This acted as a positioner to control the amount that the buffer projects. A spring mounted on the buffer tail reacts against a holding post made up from a piece of scrap etch.

Finally the prominent vacuum pipe that runs along the solebar was added and retained in place by split-pins; at least it would hide any wiggles in the solebar angle on that side of the coach. The Sidelines lost wax brass vacuum pipes come straight and they had to be gently reformed, i.e. bent, into the angled up pipe typical of these coaches.

I should have made up some brass bosses to mount the bogies on, but I couldn’t resist using the plastic centres of some redundant Ian Kirk 4mm bogie frames as they seemed to be just the right depth. The truss rods were added as per instructions, although it was more practical to split the fold up turnbuckle into three separate pieces and solder them together that way.


Bogies

There are a number of 7mm Gresley bogie kits around, I went with the JLTRT ones for the main reason in that I knew the castings would need little cleaning up and I was right. The only thing they do lack is the brake gear, although on these type of bogies it is fairly well hidden. I really wanted to represent the outer brakes that can just be seen and used Sidelines brake castings to do the job. The bogie castings assembled well, the only point to watch was that with the central bolster and end castings in place that the sideframes remained parallel.

I guess there might have been some shrinkage discrepancies with larger castings, which can happen, but this was easy enough to resolve once I had worked out what the problem was. I liked the way the axleboxes are free to move in the hornguides. I had to carefully counterbore the backs of them to allow the flanges of the top hat bearings to fit ‘inside’ them so that the Easybuild wheels would rotate freely. This was not a big problem.

The full brake required Fox bogies and ABS produce a suitable whitemetal kit. This assembled without any problem. Unusually the vehicle I was modelling had a stretcher bar between the axlebox retainers. This was not common, but I fancied a feature of interest. This was achieved by hand drilling into the castings and springing some brass wire in. I embossed some rivets in some suitable brass strip and used it for the axlebox retainers.

I invested in a GW riveting tool some time ago. If you are going to do much 7mm kit building it is an invaluable tool, forming good rivet heads without distorting the surrounding material. I got mine as a birthday present from Mrs G. No one else in the family understood what it was.

Light springs were used on all of the bogies between the head of the 4BA screw and the underside of the bogie to try and eliminate any wobble, time will prove if it works.

Painting and finishing

With a house move in the offing, I might be getting closer to building the railway, but I had a number of projects that had reached the painting stage, so I decided to hold that work until after the move. However in the meantime it meant that I could take the coaches to various running sessions and iron out any problems before they were painted. They seemed to run ok and are surprisingly weighty considering that the body is all plastic.

After visiting a few shows and private railways, I decided that I couldn’t live with the moulded handles. Other people had replaced them with brass ones on theircoaches. So one afternoon I carefully carved them off. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I fitted Griffin brass ones and they do the job nicely, and I can sleep at night knowing that the coaches look better.

Unfortunately this led on to some dissatisfaction with the hinges and I copied the method passed to me by a demonstrator, Andrew Baldwin, at the Telford O gauge show. This was to make hinges from 0.02in x 0.02in Evergreen strip for the top and middle hinges – the lower ones are 0.02in x 0.06in and are carefully trimmed to shape after they have been allowed to set for a day. The hinges are set on the joint line with plenty of solvent to make sure they fix securely. Some of Andrew’s superb rolling stock can be seen on Gifford Street sidings from time to time.

I finally got to the stage where the coaches could be painted, so they were broken down into the various sub-assemblies and cleaned with Jif in the kitchen sink. This was followed by a good rinsing and then they spent twenty-four hours in the airing cupboard to dry out. I was lucky enough to get some sunny, dry days to work outside and spray the underframes with Halfords primer, and after inspection, that was followed by Satin Black.

Later on, before reassembly, these parts were sprayed with a weathering mix. I like the original carmine livery that these coaches had in the early 1950s, and this livery survived in some cases to quite late on. I decided to have one coach in this livery, although I’m not sure any survived until 1962. I sprayed the coaches with Halfords primer and used Just Like the Real Thing aerosol cans for the main colours. This always sprays well and gives a good finish. I was probably pushing the limits as the temperature was struggling to get above 12 degrees. This all turned out to be a long drawn out process as we were well in to the autumn and I had to wait for suitable warm days to paint and find time between working on the house.

The usual sequence of numbering and varnishing with Precision Satin followed. The coaches were weathered by painting on diluted matt black and then wiping it off – a frightening process. Hopefully this captures the neglected sooty appearance that I desire.

A variety of passengers was added. The Slaters ones seem somewhat diminutive compared with some of the other offerings available. However they provide some life to the coach and justify the continuation of the Nottingham Victoria to Derby Friargate service.

Almost the last task was to fit the windows, which took an age, as each window fits inside a rebate on the inside of the coach body. These were mass produced by cutting strips of glazing material. Some of the vertical rebates are quite shallow, so it was difficult to hide the edge of the glass.

I used Cobex, from Comet Models. It’s quite a hard material and resists scratching more than normal clear plastic card and looks more glass like. However, it doesn’t take to solvent quite so easily so I actually used G-S Hypo Cement, which has a very fine applicator tube. This minimises the amount of glue smudging. This sticks, rather than melts the two surfaces together, so the windows are a little fragile. One has to accept that there will be a failure rate, so I cut a good supply of spare panes. Once the coach was fully glazed, I inspected and popped out any that had smudges or a poor fit. It was a bit of a pain, but you know your mates will happily point out any bad workmanship.

Conclusion

It was a form of kit bashing to put these coaches together, and it was interesting sourcing the various parts. So that made it a bit of a challenge, half of the problem was discovering where to get parts from or if they existed at all. That knowledge only came from visiting O gauge shows and taking to chums.

The plastic makes a considerable mess when being worked, and it sticks to everything, but I think I got away with it – no domestic wrath. Care has to be taken with the modules to create a coach side that is straight in both planes. With the modular approach to these panelled coaches, it might well be possible to go through the diagram book and use different combinations to produce other coach variants. I’ve done that with Gresley coaches in 4mm scale in the past. It will be atmospheric to see them trundling along behind an elderly J6 or an L1. I would like to do some more really, and I guess it would be quicker now I know all the snags.

I also used this project to assist one of my chums into model making, as it covered all three common disciplines, working in plastic, white metal and brass. That was a useful exercise. This was a project that took over a year, due to the house move and working on other projects. Now all I have to do is build some steel panelled vehicles to keep them company. I think they will probably be less work…I hope!