Model Railway Musings

I acquired this loco some time ago, it as missing its buffers, whistle and a few other bits, on the buffer beams the paint had been striped off, however the loco ran very well, the original makers of this loco, Hattons has ceased trading, the rights to the model have passed to another company, and they do not hold spare buffers for the original models, this model had distinctive buffers, there are aftermarket replacements however these are not presently available, I toyed with the idea of fitting dumb buffers (blocks of wood), I had noticed that another company had large head buffers available as a spare part for one of their models (Dapol's Hawthorn Leslie 0-4-0), I purchased a set of 4, on arrival a test fit showed that the holes on the buffer bean were too small for the new buffers, I finally sored out a drill bit of the correct size and enlarged the buffer beam holes and glued the new buffers in place, when the glue was dry I painted the buffer beams, the whistle and couplings were replaced, I looked through my spare DCC decoder box and found a suitable DCC decoder, this engine needs a very small decoder, it had originally been intended to use a Hattons six pin decoder, during production it was announced that the intended Hattons decoder would not fit and that a Guagemaster 23 (later 93) decoder would be required,

fitting and programming the decoder went without any problems. All that's left to do is knock up some injectors as these always break off when removing the body and were missing when the loco arrived.

 

At the recent Toy Fair in Ewell I brought 6 wagons for £15, one wagon still had its original box with the price sticker attached, by todays prices £1.75p is cheap, at the time this wagon was originally sold £1.75p would have brought 7 pints of beer and had 7p change, one of the things I always do with rolling stock is change the plastic wheels for metal ones and also change the couplings to more modern slimline ones, I mused as both the couplings and th wheels each cost more than the original wagon.