I enjoy building things, but locomotives and coaches take me a long time to complete and this one took me even longer than usual, over twenty-five years in fact. The starting point was the gift of a few off-cuts of three millimetre plywood from a friend in the furniture-making business.

They were 20 by 5 inches but the grain ran along the short dimension which limited their use for household projects. I could probably have used them for model buildings but I didn’t, and still don’t, have a layout so a long vehicle body like a coach or a van seemed more appropriate. Searching through my prized copy of Historic Carriage Drawings in 4mm scale by Jenkinson and Campling, I lighted on the Gresley Travelling Post Office.

The features that made this vehicle attractive, in addition to its obvious special purpose fittings, were the vertical upper sides, the relatively few windows and the simple roof profile which avoids the need to form the more usual domed ends found on most Gresley coaches. I saw at once that I could use the natural vertical grain of the plywood to lend texture to the upper panels but I rather under estimated the labour of building all the special equipment that characterises a TPO. To clinch the choice, I had a sheet of HMRS transfers for LNER coaches which included two gorgeous ‘Royal Mail’ brandings complete with the GR royal cipher and a crown. These would obviously go to waste if I never built one of these vehicles.

I used the plywood to make the carcase from a floor, two ends and two sides, with a few partitions as you can see from the photograph of the interior. To form the recessed double doors on the net side, I used a double thickness of plywood on that side only, with appropriate gaps in the outer sheet for the doors and the net. I felt this strengthened the side, especially as the top lights come quite close to the doors, but it did mean the top-lights and windows had to be fret-sawed through six plies rather than three. The openings in the inner layer were in any case larger than the windows themselves, to allow for the glazing, and on both the outer skins I enlarged a glazing recess in the inner ply using a scalpel.

Before gluing the net side, I rounded the edges of the outer pieces of three-ply at the doors and the net recess. The roof is cut back in this region so the side must be locally taller to match and this makes cutting out the sides somewhat more complicated. Cutting the glazing recesses did result in a few broken bits of plywood behind the thin uprights between the windows, but I was able to glue them all back in and disguise any gaps. The curve of the lower sides was sanded to shape before cutting the windows and the exposed layers of the plywood provide a witness to keep the profile uniform along the side while sanding proceeds, as the edges between each layer should remain parallel.

The panelling was all made from thin card, about 0.25 mm or 0.010” thick, depending on your persuasion. For square cornered panelling like this, there is no need to make an elaborate cut out doily to cover each side. Rather, I used large plain pieces to form the lower panels and added the upper verticals and horizontals from strips of card about 1 mm wide. There is an extra layer of beading to apply on top of the lower panels and I made this again from card strips, but these are only half a millimetre wide. They should by rights be half-round in section but the glue, the shellac and the paint disguise their rectangular form. It’s just a matter of copying what is shown on the drawing.

The ends are panelled in a similar fashion and there are a few steel plates to represent in the net recess. In fact I formed the bodyside parts of the hinges for the net from cardboard too, with entomological pins pushed through drilled holes to simulate all the bolt heads.

I completed the body, painted and lined it many years ago but the net arrangement and the ‘traductor arms” caused me so many problems that I put the whole project aside. I worked out how to make the net frame but no amount of poring over drawings and photographs could get me any nearer to understanding what the traductor arms really looked like. These are the little derricks which stand either side of each door to hold the mailbags ready to be snatched by the line-side apparatus.

My break through moment came when I bought a Lochgorm Models kit for a Highland Railway TPO which included some excellent lost wax castings for these very items. Andy Copp agreed to sell me another set of these for my own model and I was then inspired to finish the job.

Of course, I could have resolved these details by studying the TPO vehicles which still run on some preserved railway lines. I believe there are examples at Didcot and at Loughborough, but these are a long way from Aberdeen and somehow the spirit did not move me on the odd occasions I have visited them. The Didcot exhibit is particularly interesting to me because it is based around the line-side apparatus which used to stand at Penrith and was the last functioning equipment of its kind in Britain.

My grandmother was brought up in Penrith and years ago she took me for a walk “down Thacka beck” to show me this very installation. She told me that as a child, and later when my mother was a child, they would often walk down there of an evening just to watch the regular ‘mail click’ in action. They appreciated free entertainment in those days.

The roof was formed from mounting board using the ‘soggy cardboard’ method over a wooden former which had to be specially planed for this vehicle as the TPO roof profile is asymmetrical about the centre line. I mounted the timber former on a wider timber base plate to which I could screw down lengths of aluminium angle to clamp the cardboard tight to the sides of the former while it dried out. A top layer of cartridge paper glued in place also helps to lock in the shape and then the roof was glued to a flat piece of cardboard which forms both a ceiling for the vehicle and a projecting gutter (or is it a cant-rail?) to the roof. I hope the photograph of the end of the roof will make this clearer. You can see the cut out to clear the net, the rain-strips which are also made of card, the tails of the Gresley roof ventilators which are boughtin castings, likewise some wire glued in to represent handrails at each end. Not visible here are the water tank fillers which are the reason for the handrails, simply made from some circular card punchings.

The varnished teak effect was executed using Dulux Brushwood tester pots which were a new product when I used them, but are now no longer available. All my other Gresley stock has been painted using Radcliffe’s scumble and I think I get a better result with that, but perhaps a rather coarser grain effect. In either case, you apply a base colour first, usually a pale yellow, but here and there a panel in orange or even pink can break up the colouration more realistically. ‘Teak’ scumble is available but I think ‘oak’ looks more like the real thing. The full size lining consists of a primrose line with a narrow vermilion line either side. I couldn’t achieve this but I did manage to add a single vermilion line alongside the yellow which is actually how Ralph Steadman rendered this feature on some of his litho coach sides. I only did this on the non-net side of the coach and admitted defeat on the side with the net, applying only the primrose line.

I bought some CPL etched corridor connections for a TPO at Telford one year, but when I got them home I discovered they were an especially wide version unique to the LBSCR, so I made mine from plastic card but I did use the etched parts for the scissors connections. I could not make the scissors work correctly, but this did not matter as my own bodies were rigid. The tarpaulin over each connection was cut from a plastic bag of Murray Mints and painted grey (other confectionery is available). I fitted a vacuum pipe along one sole bar, attached with tiny soldered clips, making this the only one of my coaches so equipped.

I could have obtained an etched frame for the net from Lochgorm Models, but I had already added the hinges to my vehicle side and their spacing did not exactly match the etching. On top of that, I had made myself a drawing for a scratch-built version and I thought it would be more three dimensional than an etching. I devised a plan of action to combine silver solder and soft solder so that it would not fall apart half way through construction. One problem with hard soldering brass is that the metal becomes so soft that it deforms far too easily while being handled. I read up on the technique described by Harold Underhill in his books on model sailing ships and found that he advocated copper for the delicate fittings arrayed along the masts and yards.

Various thicknesses of copper wire were hunted down and some were hammered into a square section to form the main part of the frame. It did seem to me that the copper survived the high temperature flame better, and even though it did anneal, it seemed to stiffen up again after a day or two.

Once I had a frame to work with, pieces of nickel silver sheet were soft-soldered in position to represent plates and hinge elements. The net would actually deploy into its extended shape once I had finished, but I did not want this to happen spontaneously so it is permanently locked into the stowed position. The geometry of the net frame is somewhat simplified and I have tried to illustrate it using a perspective view of a computer representation.

The net itself came from some fine curtain mesh obtained from a haberdashery, tinted brown with water colour. The haberdashery counter at John Lewis also provided the ‘pearl’ buttons which I used to represent the side lamps, but this year when I came to look for some more of these to decorate my HR TPO, I could find nothing the right size. There are photographs of each side of the vehicle and a close up of the net, in addition to the interior and roof details I have already mentioned. I think my finished model does justice to the transfers and it proved very satisfying to build it from cheap basic materials. I have contemplated using the same plywood technique to represent a Gresley full brake which has similar windows and a big expanse of vertical wood-grain, but I think it would be an awful lot of work for a standard passenger coach. However, I have not solved the problem of making a domed ended roof in cardboard which even the full brake would need. At my production rate of one wooden coach every twenty-five years, I suppose I could just plane one out of timber.