In 2011 various discussions went on with Allen Doherty of Worsley Works about whether he would do some etches in H0 for us. Some of these bore no fruit, alas, but one that was successful resulted in him agreeing to make a number of bogie and 6-wheel GNSR coach etches, which he already had in 3mm, available in H0.

He also now makes them in 00 as well. You can see what he has available on his website (www.worsleyworks.co.uk). Only the six-wheelers are available as yet, as the three Society members who ordered from him didn’t want any of the bogie ones. Even better, he agreed to make a six-wheel Cleminson chassis for them.

As a pre-Grouping modeller, I was delighted, and ordered one each of the Diagrams available, plus a sixth which I hoped could be made into yet a further GNSR coach type.

When the etches came I tried to work out what would be needed to complete the models and what I would and (more importantly) would NOT be capable of.

I have no experience of brass folding and soldering – let alone scratch-building in that medium – something I knew would be necessary since Worsley describe what they produce as only “scratch build aids”, not kits. So my first task was to contact George Mitcheson of Newbigginby- the-Sea, a master brass etch builder and the man who had built my S-Class 4-4-0 a year previously. He agreed to do all the brass etch work including the construction of the Cleminson chassis, leaving me to source and assemble all the other parts and then paint and apply transfers. In what follows I’ve included George’s own assessment of what he did (indented text).

The Brass Build

The coaches are typical of Worsley Works offerings in as much as they are ‘scratch aids‘ rather than complete kits. In this case they are superior to a scratch aid but fall short of a kit!

What you get are sides with separate door droplights and ventilators, ends, end footsteps, solebars and top footboard, headstocks, floor pan and roof, and the Cleminson etch as described below.

All the etches are from 12 thou brass so the half etched-sections are quite thin and easily damaged. The tumblehome on the coach side was produced in the time honoured method using a 25mm diameter bar pressed down on the coach side laid on a piece of carpet.

The roofs are elliptical and were produced in the same fashion using 25mm diameter bar for the main curve and 8mm diameter bar for the smaller curve. Door ventilators as etched looked nothing like the bulbous efforts of the GNSR. The etched ones were given a drop of flux and then a quick

Contents of this issue

GNSR six-wheel coaches .............1-3
A Southern Railway Class 70 .......... 4
Lowering the Rivarossi Royal Scot .. 5
Queenborough Cement Co. van ...6-7
The “humble” Land Rover .............8-9
IHA telescopic hood wagon ......10-11
Trade news .................................... 12

Last job before detailing is to fit the head stocks which have to be cut to a scale 4ft thickness. So far so good, any problems encountered were really minor in nature. For example, one brake van (Diagram 51) was 6in wider in real life than other stock, but although the ends had been widened in the etch, the roof and the floor had not. The problem of the roof was solved by cutting it down the middle and inserting a strip of brass and soldering it all back together again. The guard’s ducket was not correct and a replacement had to be made. Tedious and time-consuming but not impossible. As I said above I bought a sixth coach which I hoped could be converted into a Diagram 15 without too much trouble. But I soon realised that it wasn’t just a matter of painting and decaling it differently, but rather it needed radical surgery. I was just going to abandon this but George, master craftsman that he is, found a solution.

In 1911 the GNSR converted a Diagram 10 all first into a Diagram 15 composite. The toilets were brought to the middle and two short corridors gave access for first class passengers at one end and third from the other. As two Diagram 10 models were available, it was decided to modify one into a Diagram 15 as per prototype. It was a case of accurately cutting the coach sides into four pieces and rearranging the sections to suit the new diagram. Because of the thinness of the material it was not a job for the faint hearted, and not one to cut your soldering teeth on!

Apart from the Cleminson underframe, all-in-all the coaches went together without much difficulty and the end results are pleasing.

Bits and Pieces While George was building the coaches I was trying to source all the other bits I would need. I thought this would be very difficult especially as the 3mm Society, which I thought might provide many of the bits, suddenly lost its spares person. But in fact it proved fairly easy in that Wizard Models were able to come up with most of what I needed from their 4mm range. The axle boxes provided by them are an almost exact match in size and shape, their small coach buffers being a reasonable approximation of GNSR ones, and their turned brass Tshaped handles, while expensive, far better looking than etched ones. Most of the grab rails were done easily enough with brass wire, but the serpentine coach door grabrails defeated me completely. But George, resourceful as ever, built a jig which churned them out in the necessary numbers. The wheels were the excellent Gibson Mansell wheels on the narrower axle.

Roofs

The roofs were a little more complicated. The GNSR used oil lamps dropped through a hole in the roof with a bung in the hole in daylight – the lamps being kept at stations and inserted before nightfall. There was also a holder for the bung when the lamps were in. I had, to hand, Keith Fenwicks’s excellent book on GNSR coaches, which has drawings and photos of most of them. I chose to portray the coaches during daylight hours, and used 2.5mm rod and 3mm plastic tubing for this. One coach didn’t appear until 1916, long after the adoption of electric lighting, and had only shell vents on the roof.

Paint

In the past I have brush-painted all my models, but this time I decided to try out car spray paints. After some discussion with others in the GNSRA, I used Halfords Daewoo Ruby Red for the lower panels and Peugeot Antelope Beige for the upper panels.

The droplight windows are framed in the colour of the lower panels, and I found Polly Paints PRR Tuscan red an exact match in matt. Railmatch Acrylic Concrete is an excellent touch up colour for the Peugeot Antelope Beige. Undercoat was Halfords Grey Primer and I used Humbrol Enamel matt varnish as a final coat. For the roof, foot boards, and chassis I used Tarnished Steel from the Polly Scale Paints range.

Transfers

However all this work would have been in vain if Lorenzo Ricotti hadn’t come up trumps with decals for both lettering lozenges and lining. He had already agreed to do lettering for my GNSR vans, but his very kind offer to create the coach decals saved me an enormous amount of work and immeasurably improved the final result. I am the first to admit to not being much of a painter, and it is my hope that when suitably “weathered” the dirt will hide, to some extent, the lack of quality in my painting.

Once the last coach is complete and the weathering on them all done, I will fit Kadees and they will hopefully be running on Dundarg this coming Spring when I get the layout back out into the garage.

Photos of completed models by Kenneth Clark GNSR coach diagram 47 GNSR