4mm Far North Line

Ben Alder

Ben Alder

Western Thunderer
One of the builds was of a proposed slightly larger Ben - Peter Drummond had several ideas to beef up the basic Ben, as usual very much influenced by his brother, and this one was basically a T9 with 6' drivers. The extra boiler length gives it a more graceful look than its smaller sisters. As only one side can ever be seen on the layout I gave it two different names, both local to the section north of Helmsdale.

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A

aardvark

Western Thunderer
I agree completely.

Looking at the images just now, I suspect that the clever placement of the fence does much to hide the discontinuity between the foreground colours and the desaturated background colours. I hadn't noticed this before.
 
Ben Alder

Ben Alder

Western Thunderer
Thanks, but it was John at Art Printers who produced the background, taken from the Caley's Strathmore route, which suited my needs so well. I was going to do a panoramic stitch of the actual Helmsdale site, but his one was more than satisfactory for my needs. IMO, he should have been a candidate for some of those annual awards for producing such an innovative product, which upped the ante on backscenes so much. You see this one on layouts from north to south of this island, but to my mind it works best on layouts based in the northern half of Scotland. As for my efforts, I picked up an aside from Chris Nevard before starting this build about beginning from the backscene forward, which I took on board, using similar shades to those in the backscene, and conveniently the station fence was in exactly in the right place to hide the transition. I also worked under the same lighting both on the layout and the workbench - 6500k daylight tubes - to ensure a consistent colour balance between the components of the layout.
 
Ben Alder

Ben Alder

Western Thunderer
Latest off the bench is a gas tank for Helmsdale. Information on and details of these wagons is almost non existent, both the HR and LMS versions are recorded as having no photographic records in the respective wagon books although glimpses can be seen in background shots now and again but with little worthwhile detail. However, I came across a clear picture of one at The Mound some decades ago and used this as the basis for the model. As scratchbuilding one would have turned in to long complicated job for what is going to be a more or less static model I took the line of least resistance and used a Chivers six wheel chassis and two cut down Oxford tank bodies as the core of the model and added details taken from other photos. Here it is and a shot of the model and inspiration .
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Differences between the two can be seen but the body on the prototype is alraedy different to the one shown in the LMS book so I didn't feel constrained by the need for total accuracy here. Below can be seen the sum of my further info gathering into this type of wagon...

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LarryG

LarryG

Western Thunderer
Intrigued by LMS third class Restaurant Car. It seems to carry SCM 102. Early BR days before SC102M was adopted. LMS lake livery with LMS transfers.
 
Ben Alder

Ben Alder

Western Thunderer
Another what might have been now - lightweight 2-6-2 BR development of an Ivatt design that could have been a runner if the Prairie arrangement had been adopted more in the UK - a beefed up 2MT with a stretched BR Class 3 tank boiler for lines such as the Kyle and Far North ones. There is actually a scintilla of justification for this as both the LMS and the HR planned light 4-6-0's for this sort of thing, the HR one having 5' drivers as per the build, and this was a modern replacement for them...IMG_0959a.JPGIMG_0951.JPGIMG_0952.JPGIMG_0957.JPG
 
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Ben Alder

Ben Alder

Western Thunderer
This loco has been hopefully the last in an exploration of what if BR Standards that I tackled during lockdown, all of which are just about finished, running but needing bits of attention of details which I will pick off one by one as I get round to it, but was an afterthought resulting from spare leftover bodies; the whole project stemming from an accumulation of damaged or bargain locos picked up cheaply over the last few years with the intention of repairing and moving on, thinking that most of my layout work had been done, but of course, the pile of things to do never diminishes and when I decided to scratch the itch of tackling alternative locos, I had a readily available source of material and extra time to make it a large project. I'll look at them as they get completed, but an aside from the 2-6-2 was two spare 82xxx bodies, the tank and cab of one I combined with a 2MT boiler and chassis to give an alternative 84xxx. Different enough from the real thing but an interpretation of what could have been a useful loco had history turned out differently.
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Ben Alder

Ben Alder

Western Thunderer
Digging through the files for an image, I came across one from late 2019, just before everything went t**s up, and which I'd forgotten about - a HR 0-6-0 fitted out for snowplough work. Based on an early 1945 photo of one at Tain I came across in my roamings of the net. I gave it a bit of a hybrid finish, not historically accurate as these locos were replaced by CR ones just after the War and sent south to Glasgow, but my flexible timeline can sort this sort of thing out......IMG_0928a.JPG
 
Ben Alder

Ben Alder

Western Thunderer
Thanks for the compliments. I have been somewhat dilatory and sporadic in my posts here, something I intend to rectify for the future, but here is another of my builds - two 0-4-4T 's, one a CR loco from a DJH kit and the other a proposed HR version from his brother, but plainly a clone of the Caley one. The CR one has the inset cab.
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D6356

D6356

Western Thunderer
That looks quite brutish for an HR creation - ideal for the Ullapool light railway perhaps? A great model of the what -if- class of tank cannot even see the join ! ( Mind the gap between the train and reality) - as I always wanted to say when working sprinters back in the day!
Robert
 
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