After struggling on many such vehicles I have now worked out that if you fit one support at each end, you can adjust the position of the footstep until all is well, then solder in the other supports. I know it is obvious but it took me 30 years to learn that trick, so I will pass it on in case anybody else is as daft as I am!

When it came to painting and lettering, I was pleased to find suitable transfers on the HMRS sheet that covers the Midland Railway. They provide First, Third and Guard's door wording as well as the LT&SR waist lettering, numbers and crests. The only thing they didn't provide was the 'Second' door lettering. Rather than match my hand lettering against transfers (Gold is an awful colour to match), I had a look at what I had in my transfer drawer and found some GWR 'Seconds'. These were used with some black shading added with mapping pen and acrylic black ink.

The livery is an area where I disagree with the published material. All the references talk about the LT&SR carriage livery being var­nished teak, but the photos show a dark, solid colour with no trace of graining. In the absence of any alternative, my customer and I discussed and agreed that we would go for a medium/dark brown colour. As I said earlier, I know next to nothing about the LT&SR but I was provided with a colour photo of a carriage crest transfer (or perhaps it was hand painted?). The real crest is presented on a dark green background and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out one day that the early carriage livery was this colour. Why mount a crest on a background that doesn't represent the carriage colour? Other crests I have seen have always been on a 'carriage coloured' background.

So maybe they will need a fresh coat of paint when the truth emerges, but for now, they are brown, with red ends on the brake carriages. A Tamiya acrylic brown was used. I can't recall the exact colour but it was something to do with the Japanese Navy or some such organisation. A couple of coats of johnson's 'Klear', applied after the transfers, lifted the finish from a dead matt to something between satin and full gloss. When you look at photos from the period, you can see many reflections in carriage paintwork, so that sort of finish is quite appropriate.

As they are to run as a fixed rake, I made up a dummy screw coupling from wire and soldered it to one coupling hook. The dummy couplings stick out horizontally and the end loop drops over the hook of the adjacent carriage. This arrangement works well as long as it is not expected to cope with small radius curves, and it has the advantage that the whole rake moves together when the loco pulls away. It is a pet hate of mine to see a passenger train moving off one carriage at a time like a loose-coupled goods! The ends of the brake carriages have Masokits screw couplings, which are my choice for working couplings as the pins can be soldered through the links for strength and they dangle nicely!