...and to buy one would be greedy...

I seem to have bought a new Minitrains steam tram loco by sort of mistake. I emailed Andrew Hastie to ask if he had any in stock yet and the next thing I know, one was on his way. I could easily have stopped it but I'd always wanted an Egger tram and this is a much nice thing; apart from anything else it runs beautifully.

Fresh out of the box

I'm not one to leave anything alone, so I straight away set about a few little modifications, nothing major as I didn't want to bugger it up. First thing I did was to order some Henschel works plates and name plates from Narrow Planet. It will be named 'Brigitte', Anyone's guess when the plates will get made as NPs etcher is in hiding - fair do's.

In a lot of ways the most obvious part of this loco is the roof so I decided that I'd change the plastic whistle for a nice brass one. In the process I scratched the roof and had to polish it out; I had wondered about a spot of paint on the roof but this confirmed it. Gunmetal from Tamiya is my chosen loco roof colour and I think it just gives it a bit of something. 

With the Jelly Models O&K coach

Looking in my loco bits box I saw a bell from a Minitrains F&C and it looked just right for a tram, on the roof would have been too tall so in the front window seemed a good idea. I've also given the loco some crew which along with the bell help to conceal the inevitable Minitrains flywheel. Using a couple of metallic sharpies I picked out the chimney cap in copper and the lamps in brass. There are some pipes running down the sides of the boiler so a similar idea with Tamiya tinbitz just brings them out of the dark slightly.

Nice loco

I've decided that with the enforced home isolation, I should get done as many of the little jobs that are on the never ending list as I can make myself do. So I started by re attaching the couplings to a TeeBee flat wagon that I dropped onto a hard floor. I also wanted to use the 009 society FR open coach with the tram but it had always had couplings at slightly the wrong height and no passengers. Both things now sorted it makes a good holiday train with another of Tom's prints, a slat seated open coach, this always looked nice but was slightly too tall so I cut a section out of the roof support and reattached it. Much  better. While I was looking for people I noticed that I had a large collection of Preiser luggage so I loaded up the flat wagon to go with the holiday makers.

Also stuck a cat on the roof... we have an old black cat who used to like to sneak into any car she could and get a sneaky ride so I figure that she might also like to ride on trains.

Loads of other half finished and unstarted projects to attend to so who knows what I'll do next... apart from wash my hands. Stay safe.