The chassis came from Geoff Munday and the electronics were updated from a 40mhz receiver and a Brian Jones speed controller to an Mtroniks viper marine ESC and a ORX receiver. It's fitted with a 7.2v 6 cell Ni-mh battery which is 2600mah.

To lengthen the body I first cut off the rear bonnet of the faller e train body flush with the cab. I then used four (two on each side) cast white metal radiator grille panels which came in the box with the chassis. These were used along with a combination of wooden supports to strengthen the panels. The cab of the loco had already been modified by John Orson as the body came off a loco I bought at the New Years Steam Up. After test fitting the body on the chassis I realised that the section I had previously extended wasn't high enough to clear the top of the motor and therefore wouldn't sit on the chassis, so I added some sections of wood on the underside of the rear bonnet to raise it up.

Once it all sat nicely on the chassis I tackled the job of extending the curved top of the rear bonnet so that it was flush up to the rear of the cab. To do this I first sanded down a clean iced lolly stick to match the curve of the bonnet. I then glued this in place. Once this had dried is used a thin sheet of wood bent to the curve of the bonnet top and glued it in place. There were however some gaps in the extended parts of the body, so I ordered some Humbrol model filler to fill these gaps, which worked brilliantly, and after a little sanding and a bit more filling it was all flush.

The body was then repainted and I masked off some areas which were highlighted with either white or black paint.

As of yet I have not been able to figure out a way to fix the body to the chassis while still being able to remove it if needed, so at the moment it just sits on the chassis and is held in-line with two pieces of wood that line up with the inner edges of the cab.

The wagons are built from some wooden desktop storage crates bought from the Works (which is a shop that sells books and arts and crafts supplies). I bought everything I needed to make the chassis including the jig for making them again off the website from Geoff Munday. I was lucky as there were already some prebuilt chassis in the box. They use Binnie Engineering wheels and axle boxes and are just supposed to be very simple, cheap to make wagons which I can easily make a rake of.

The first mistake I made was getting carried away with wanting to get them running which ended up with me having two fully built unpainted wagons which I later had to do a lot of masking off so I didn't end up painting the wheels. The wooden crates were simply just superglued onto the pre-built chassis. They were then primed and painted with brown espresso spray paint as I wanted a dark brown colour. Once dried, I started adding the wheels and axle boxes. I then added the very simple hook and chain which were just bent out of some brass wire. The wooden block buffers were an afterthought after I saw that B&Q had strips of wood for sale. I have plans to make more and I'd like to get a fairly good sized rake out of them, hopefully including a matching guards van.

September 2020