Kit-bashing in ‘N’
I was very pleased when my grandson bought me a Peco NR-45E cattle truck for Christmas. Looking at it afterwards, it’s quite bright ‘out of the box’ and the bars across the upper openings look chunky. Research revealed NER and LNER trucks weren’t to this pattern – Peco’s model seems to be to a BR diagram from the 1950s.
Before bashing my Peco model, I bought the kit version to test my skills. Three areas of the body can be modified by us novices. Firstly, openings: Peco uses depressions to depict a circular one in the left-hand door, openings between the floor and lowermost planks, and between the second and third planks. The circular ones I opened using a fine drill in a pin vice; the lower opening seems moulded against the floor, so is nigh impossible. Openings between the second and third planks I drilled with the pin vice and finished with a scalpel.
Secondly, I replaced the longitudinal bar using fine wire. As I wanted to evoke the NER designs, I inserted two bars. There’s a lip to the end walls on the body, giving somewhere to attach the bars. I carefully cut the wire and used Blu Tack to hold it while glueing. It didn’t matter if they weren’t perfectly straight or square – the NER/LNER designs suffered body sag and rot (thanks to… err… bovine by-products... if you get my drift).
Finally, Peco uses a standard wagon roof moulding. Research showed that roofs often had transverse strapping, so I removed the gutters with a scalpel and used strips from self-adhesive labels for straps.
I painted the outside in burnt sienna and the roof in grey. I like the dry-brushing technique for bringing out details. I picked out the handbrake handles and swapped the disc wheels for spoked and painted the tyres white (although this rarely happened). I accept my models will never be right, but I like what I’ve done. And, of course, I added a remoo-vable load (sorry!).
Like many modellers, I’m limited by budget and modest skills. Many ‘N’ gauge kits are inexpensive, so it hardly matters if you make a mistake, you can always get another. If you’ve never kit-bashed, try it! Tom Dodds, Hexham