Having had both of my A1/1 chassis back from a good friend recently, who very kindly took on the job to fit Graeme King's excellent etched parts for the valve gear, I've restarted work on both of my Thompson Great Northern conversions. For the time being, I will be concentrating my efforts on the model destined to be painted in express passenger blue, and numbered 60113 with the original straight sided nameplates.
I have made a slight deviation from Graeme King's method of dealing with the front bogie (which you can read about by clicking here), and chose to go for something within my skill set. Basically, I used a set of pliers to turn up the ends of the connector, to form a U shape. I drilled a new hole, just off centre of the square part at the rear of the connector, and the result can be seen below:
The idea behind it is that it gives the bogie enough manoeuvrability on the track, whilst also giving the correct wheelbase, and allowing the resin side frame pieces to fit either side.
This chassis, incidentally, was a spare I bought off eBay some years ago, which was DCC fitted with a very nice chip whose origins I have been unable to discover. It runs very, very smoothly on DCC, and unlike all other DCC fitted chassis I have used does not stutter on DC for various reasons in reverse.
Forward and reverse gear proved remarkably smooth. The model will get a run in next month at High Wycombe Model Railway Club, when I hope to have completed more of it (perhaps even in blue paint by then) and have finished a large amount of the build on the apple green variant too.
Until next time.
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