Busy, busy, busy

My day off has been dedicated to playing trains and as my wife is away tonight and my daughter volunteered to make dinner, I've had all evening to play.( except for doing the washing up)

I've been working on three locos today which has been pretty satisfying as two out of three of them look good and actually run well too.

The first is a diesel loco I made a while ago on an Arnold Kof chassis. I always like the look of it but had little joy getting it to run well but with a little bit of fiddling it now runs fine. The only thing I need to do is to raise the height of the couplings slightly as it tends to uncouple at the slightest bump in the track and I have plenty of those.

The second loco is my 0-8-0 WD Hunslet bash which needs running in but apart from that is ok. I added the plates I had made for the Chris Ward Fairlie which I sold a while ago and it looks really good. Just needs a coat of varnish and a light weathering.

Thirdly, I've started painting the new Varikit bash. The chassis is still not right but I'll ignore that for now. I've gone for dark angel green with a shiny brass dome. Looks good, I've got name and works plates on order from Narrow Planet for this loco, Nancy and Beddgelert.

While I was looking for something else I found the lost wax brass casting for a reversing lever so I fitted that to the cab, its a bit oversize to be honest but once there is a crew aboard it won't be very visible.

Beddgelert so far. It needs some extra weight at the front as it is balancing on the rear drivers at the moment. The cab roof isn't attached yet so I'll make a styrene replacement which will help. I've been looking for pictures of the real loco but I can only find half a dozen or so, none of which show the rear bunker very clearly. I need to know if it was open on top or whether the coal was loaded in some other way.