More Coaches

I seem to be in the mood for making up more rolling stock recently, and the recent visit to Railex Taunton gave me the chance to pick up some more of the Dundas Vale of Rheidol coaches for kit-bashing.

One thing I really wanted to play around with this time round though was making a matching brake coach. Luckily the Dundas Models Rheidol brake van is in the same matchboard styling as the standard coaches so this was a simply case of cutting a compartment end off of one set of coach sides with a razor saw and grafting it on to the brake van sides with a good amount of solvent.

Something to note for anyone wanting to attempt this is that the footboards on the brake and coaches are of ever so slightly differing thicknesses. A couple of strips of 20x40thou plastic corrected this, along with some slight gaps left from the cutting process.

And on the reverse. The brake van uses a slightly different method of locating the floor compared to the coaches, so a new locating strip was quickly made from an off cut of 40thou square strip. A spare coach chassis (DM13) was then cut n' shut to the required length and the body assembled around it, also acquiring a couple of compartment bulkheads to divide passenger, luggage and guard spaces.

Using a similar technique two four compartment coaches were constructed like the larger five compartment one seen earlier, again with 20x40thou and 40thou square strip to fill in the gaps. The brake is ever so slightly shorter, but as a set they compliment each other very nicely.

An upshot to all this cutting and shutting is that I now have the spare chassis from the Brake Van kit and a good chunk of coach sides sitting in the 'spares' pile...

Leaving the chassis to one side for the moment, fiddling around with the coach pieces on my desk resulted in this arrangement. Turn the single door on the left hand end into a driving cab and there's an instantaneous freelance narrow gauge autocoach for a steamer/trailer for the railcar. 

A project for another day...