Price: £45 plus £8 postage

Purchased, built and reviewed by Tommy Day

The kit is a mixture of resin mouldings and etchings, and requires wheels, paint and transfers to complete.

It is very simple to build using superglue, and a small amount of soldering of etched assemblies, and only requires basic tools, including a tool for embossing the pre-marked rivets, to complete. The instructions are supplied on a small CD and are mainly photographs, with notes, showing the assembly sequence, but no drawing, or information on the source drawings the kit is based on.

The three plank wagon body comes as a one piece moulding (very nice too), to which is added the etched strapping and corner pieces and details using superglue, after punching out the half-etched rivet positions. The instructions then tell you to attach the one piece underframe (which I did) and then mount the axlebox castings (after drilling for the wheel bearings) on the inside faces of the underframe. I found at this stage that the axleboxes were too close together for the wheels and it was difficult to dress off the inside faces of the underframe once glued in place. I checked that the wheels and axleboxes were mounted correctly on the underframe before gluing the underframe to the body. The brake gear is etched and goes together very well and looks fine. Sprung buffers and etched 3-link couplings are included. The instructions also include the building up of the coke wagon extensions if required.

Apart from the above small problem, the kit has been very straight-forward and a pleasure to build, it has taken about four hours all told. The resin mouldings, castings and etches needed very little cleaning up, but the resin should be washed in soapy water before any gluing. I have a copy of the book LNER Wagons Volume 3, Scottish Area which includes drawings, historical notes and wagon numbers, and several photos that I also found useful. The model appears accurate to the drawings and close scrutiny of the photos show detail differences within the wagons.

Furness Railway Wagon Company grade all their kits for complexity and this kit is graded as ‘1’, which is the simplest. My opinion is that this kit is very good value for money, an excellent visual representation, and should not be a problem for anyone who has built similar plastic based kits. Furness RWC GNSR 3 plank wagon