The highlight of February was the attendance of The Summit at Model Rail Scotland in Glasgow. The extreme logistics of this exercise, although complex, all went to plan. A few pictures follow, courtesy of Dave S who was one of the operators.

The layout was awarded 3rd prize amongst the “visiting layouts”;assumed to be those not owned by Scottish member clubs. First prize went to an N gauge layout with loads of moving vehicle and second prize to Peter Kirmond’s “This is York”, a 2mm finescale rendition of the inside of York Station in the 1930s.

A picture of the tightly packed van taken by Allan outside the CS2 – part Tetris, part Jenga!

David’s new 7mm layout – Lyme Regis – is making excellent progress, and above are pictures of the girder bridge that Allan has made which carried the branch over the main line to the up side bay at Axminster. Lots of concrete of which the LSWR were something of a pioneer.

Those rivets (and the weathering) – lovely!

Peter’s EM conversion of the Rapido 15xx 0-6-0PT is virtually complete. The conversion has been a successfully completed after some more bushes had been made before an acceptable centred number were made (quite quickly with practice!). The issue of rotation in the wheel centre was cured by pinning the top hat section to the wheel centre.

Quartering proved a bit more difficult, basically by trial and error, aligning spokes etc. Initially the coupled wheels were fitted on the axles with just a small amount of roughing up the axle ends with a file. This technique didn’t work very well as the wheels wouldn’t run true. The wheel was resolved by making new axles and lightly scribing parallel lines along the axle with the lathe tool in the lathe. The driving axle was scribed where the gear fitted, and the gear was pressed on using the lathe, spacing washers were fitted and the wheels were pressed on a small distance and aligned by eye to the opposite wheel spokes and then pressed on fully. With the wheels and coupling rods refitted, a small amount of tweaking of the other wheels resulted in a smooth running chassis. In reality this took quite a lot of adjustment over a couple of weeks, before everything worked properly.

The valve gear was re-fitted and the eccentric crank soldered in place after Loctiting the crankpin in place. Markits plain crankpins were used, (threaded ones aren’t currently available). The retainers still have to be soldered onto the rear driven axle wheels. One of the Rapido rear wheel crank pins was damaged, and had to be replaced with the Markit’s crank pins – the threads are compatible with the Rapido wheels. Only the front wheels have retained the Rapido crankpins which have been recessed slightly into the wheel to clear the crosshead.

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