According to Chris…
There’s nothing more retro than a good kit-bashing project.
Iknow we old ’uns keep saying that today’s modellers have it all on a plate, that they can buy every locomotive they could wish for, ready-to-run. The hardest part of modelling today is opening the packaging. Sorry folks, but I’m afraid it’s true. These days, you fill in a wish list, wait a couple of years, and hey presto!, there’s the locomotive you asked for. It wasn’t always like that. I started as a teenage modeller in the 1960s. I’d been given a Hornby-dublo three-rail train set for Christmas 1955. It was the BR ‘4MT’ 2-6-4T, some wagons, an oval of track and a siding. I started trainspotting during one summer holiday. It wasn’t very demanding. The railway ran past the side of our house. I sat in the garden and took the numbers of steam locomotives taking freights to and from Feltham yard. I bought an Ian Allan ‘Abc’ book and started underlining the numbers. But I soon wanted to see more – and different – locomotives. My mum suggested that my brother and I should take the train from Staines to Weybridge. We’d lived there, right beside the line, before the move to my gran’s house, between Staines and Egham. At Weybridge, I saw Bulleid ‘Pacifics’ lots of them. So when Hornby-dublo introduced one in model form it was the catalyst that really started me off in railway modelling. I sent a photograph of No. 34109 Sir Trafford Leigh-mallory heading the 3.54pm Clapham Gate-exeter Central milk empties to Meccano Magazine, pointing out that you could model that train using the Hornby-dublo ‘West Country’ and six-wheel milk tanks. It was a defining moment. I had started on the road to becoming a railway modeller and I’d had my first article published. I was on the slippery slope, motorising Airfix and Kitmaster kits – or trying, at least – and adapting models to create something closer to the prototype that I wanted to model, because I’d exhausted the available ready-to-run types. Tri-ang and Trix were not compatible with Hornby-dublo, so I was limited to around half a dozen different locomotives. I had the ‘4MT’, a pre-war ‘Duchess’ and an ‘A4’, a ‘Castle’ and the ‘West Country’. I disposed of the LMS and LNER locomotives for £1 each at a school fête. I bought a Gaiety 0-6-0PT from Hatton’s to boost my Western ‘fleet’ and that was it. After that it was a question of “what can I buy and carve up to represent something else?” It’s been 30 or 40 years since I last considered a major carve-up of a model locomotive, but there’s one potential project that’s been niggling at me. The Midland & South Western Junction Railway, which has been a personal favourite for nearly as long as I’ve been in this business, had three Dubs-built 2-4-0 tender locomotives, built in 1894. They passed to the GWR at Grouping and Swindon revamped them with the No. 11 boiler. They were retained by BR
The hardest part of modelling today is opening the packaging
primarily to work the Lambourn branch (another personal favourite), until the mid-1950s. I find that I sometimes have to look twice at photographs to distinguish between the Dean 0-6-0 and the modified MSWJR locomotives (Nos. 1334-1336). So, could I hack an Oxford ‘Dean Goods’ into a 2-4-0? It’s going to be a likeness, not a perfect model and, clearly, the rivet counters and forum critics will need to look the other way. As Model Rail passes its 20th birthday and I approach my 55th year in the business of writing model railway articles, it might be nice to turn the clock back, just this once.