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Pre-Grouping Railways (Was Furness Railway Wagon)	Marc Dobson
10 Duke Street	01229 219875
Dalton-in-Furness
Cumbria	Email: furnessrailway@hotmail.com
LA15 8HH	Web: http://www.pregroupingrailways.com

Having scratch built two earlier S&DJR brake vans and then stalled on the third I saw the Furness Railway kit for the six-wheeled brake van as an easy option. The kit comes in a good sized box that is more than large enough to hold the finished vehicle. The van panels are cast resin, there are etched brass parts for chassis and body components and the roof, and some white metal castings for various details. The kit comes with resin castings for both early and later versions of the guards’ look-outs or duckets.

Before I continue with the positive aspects of this kit, and there are many, I’ll offer a view on the medium used to provide the documentation. It comes on a mini-CDROM. Now these were never ‘mainstream’ but I had to wonder who has the facility to read this obscure and obsolete storage medium? On request Furness kindly emailed a PDF version of the instructions.

The etches are pretty good with little cleaning up to be done although the substantial connections that hold the parts in the sheet mean that considerable care is taken when removing the components. Yes I did cut a wrong ‘un. The fit of the parts, once cleaned and folded, is largely fine.

It is a shame that the same level of care was not applied in writing the construction notes as was put into the production of the castings and etches. For me, the construction notes failed in several aspects. The modeller is left to decide on suitable adhesives for ‘sticking’ brass to resin; the notes lack detail to the point that one has to guess that something needs to be done at an intermediate stage. The order of events could lead to difficulties if followed to the letter so read the ‘instructions’ then formulate your own route to completion.

An example of applying a different approach is the assembly of the spring/brake detail to the W-iron and subsequently attaching this to the chassis. The instructions suggest assembling these three pieces (white-metal and brass) then fixing to the chassis. I initially made up one such assembly by soldering the white-metal detail to a brass W-iron then wondered how I was going to solder this to the chassis. Logic suggests that one solders the W-iron to the chassis with a ‘strong’ solder then attaches the white-metal detail, either with epoxy or low-melt solder.

By adopting this approach the brake castings can then be soldered in alignment with the wheels (temporarily mounted in their subframe). The ‘sole bar’ part of the spring/axle box casting then needs to be thinned to fit between the W-iron and sole bar. With all three components assembled prior to fixing, according to the instructions, the W-iron would not have fitted into the slot provided in the chassis and clearance for the axle ends would have been minimal.

Using this new order of events, the potential for the wheels fouling the brake casting is obviated. One can fit the brake casting to clear the wheels, not fit the casting then amend it to clear the wheels, as per the instructions. So, having consigned the ‘instructions’ to the recycling and immersed the one W-iron assembly into a pan of boiling water…

The kit comes with some plated nuts and bolts. Rather than shorten the bolts I decided to substitute some brass M3 machine screws of a more appropriate length which were soldered through the floor to provide fixings for the axle subframes. I found that all three axle/bearing sub-assemblies were far too short and needed packing with washers to get the buffer height right. This is a point to watch out for when aligning the brake castings.

With white-metal brake castings (why not plastic?) there is the risk of a wheel causing a short. If the protruding ends of the axles are tailored to the gap between the W-irons this should prevent excessive end-float that could bring wheel and brake casting coming into contact and causing a short.

There is a lot of detail to be attached to the chassis and, in my view, this soldering is best completed before fitting the resin body. The resin body needs a little light modification if the earlier duckets are to be fitted. Again I deviated from the instructions as I was reluctant to fix the body ends to the chassis in the hope that the sides would fit neatly in between. The body was assembled on a sheet of glass prior to gluing to the chassis.

I used two part rapid hardening epoxy adhesive to join the sides to the ends but not before drilling for the handrails. I used these end handrails as dowels that passed through the ends and into the sides to hold all in position when gluing as there is no other means of accurately locating the parts. I didn’t fancy clamping the assembly together only to find that something had slipped before the adhesive had gone off.

Adding the reinforcing plates to the exterior is a task I dispatched with super-glue and the right frame of mind. It did make me wonder why the majority of these details were not moulded with the body sides, leaving just the lamp brackets and corner strapping to be added during assembly.

There is nothing in the instructions regarding the brake gear but Marc at Furness kindly and very promptly supplied the drawings needed. The layout appears to be the same as the S&D 6 wheeled brake & mail vans they produced at a slightly later date. I considered some the brake linkage components rather chunky and so fitted finer parts left over from other models. It was not difficult to figure out how to assemble the brake components. The hangers that hold the brake linkage are made up from three brass layers sweated together.

Painting was carried out prior to fitting the brake gear and wheel assemblies. Basically everything was cleaned and given a coat of grey etch primer with the body subsequently being sprayed with grey enamel and all beneath being finished in dirty black. The body was then sprayed with Klear – then transfers were added - followed by another coat of Klear. A start has been made on the weathering but further work on that aspect will have to wait until I have a batch to do.

The end result works for me – and looks a lot more business-like than my 10 ton brake van hitherto used on long goods trains. I have my doubts that a twenty ton van would have been used on the Bridgewater branch but, as always, rule No. 1 applies – it’s my railway and I’ll run what I like.