HOW TO MAKE A GROUNDED BODY

The last of my four ‘gifted’ Hornby coaches was a four-wheel Third Class vehicle in GWR livery. I used this to make a grounded body. In the 1960s there were still dozens of grounded bodies used as storage and as bothies throughout BR and by no means all of them had been coaches. At Staines West a ‘Toad’ brake van body was provided as an enginemen’s bothy, while at Fairford a horsebox body performed a similar role. I remember counting no less than four grounded coach bodies in the immediate vicinity of Moreton‑in‑marsh station in the mid‑1960s. Though one was apparently on farm land, another was actually on the Down platform.

My inspiration was a little more ‘up‑market’ than a railway bothy. It was, at least, a passenger facility of sorts. The wood-anddirt platformed halt at Ashdon (left) on the branch between Bartlow and Audley End had a grounded coach body as its waiting shelter. In its final years it was served by the WMD four‑wheel diesel railbuses. The remains of the coach body, now little more than a skeleton are, apparently, still on the platform there. This was the simplest of all the conversions.

STEP BY STEP 1

The coach was dismantled as previously shown, the chassis and interior consigned to the spares box and the glazing set aside. All the door handles and commode handles were then removed with a sharp knife.

2

The middle door was removed by cutting down either side with a razor saw using the door outline as a guide and cutting as close to the gutter as the saw blade would allow.

3

The saw cuts removed most of the door, leaving just the top and the ventilator which were pared away with a sharp knife blade. The plastic is very soft, so this is an easy job.

4

Once the door is completely removed, the ragged edges of the opening can be cleaned up with a fine flat file. A clean, straight edge is easy to achieve.

5

The Ashdon ‘shelter’ had a straight, planked door, so I cut an 8mm by 24mm rectangle from an offcut of Evergreen V-groove styrene sheet. To support the door I glued two tiny triangles of styrene sheet to the coach side.

6

The door was then glued in place with Plastic Weld liquid polystyrene cement, with the planked side facing outwards. Before refitting the glazing I drilled a hole in one window and scratched it to look like a breakage.