A bit late to the party with this one, life has had its twists and turns in January including down into the Med on another mission, getting called out whilst at the excellent Define modeller’s day in Risley.

I’m there again today, writing this one from Malta..

On his most readable blog Phil Parker recently noted he’s been writing his blog for 20 years, quite an achievement to provide that content so consistently and as far as I know daily over the years, that’ll make him an influencer. Probably.

It got me thinking about my blogs, my first posting being just on 19 years back, on Norven Munky. That post looked at the Heljan Western, which was interesting for its time. Better than the previous post holders, but not quite there. I often get asked is Munky going to wake up and write some more? Well there’s plenty of material to consider… This blog has been ticking over now for a good few years too, obviously not with daily posts as per Phil’s efforts, he has my respect for that level of commitment!

On the subject of commitment there’s evidence above of just that, in a different format. This is a Rapido/Model Rail 16xx that is on the receiving end of some commitment.

This particular commitment was sparked up when revising plans for the Forest of Dean project I’m aiming to do. 16xx’s were quite prominent in the forest, and two of these have been sitting on the ‘shelf of waiting for something to happen’ for a while. Neither had had much use either so no extra work had been done to them. The opportunity of an empty garage, and empty day meant that I dug them out of storage and took a good look at them again. One thing they both needed was being ‘run in’, and that was achieved with the pair of them circulating a loop of Kato HO set track.

This is it above, it’s really robust and well built track, brilliant for plug and play. There’s something serene about just watching a train circulating, and with the moulded base a far reduced chance of any carpet fluff etc getting in a mechanism if used indoors. You can see it’s good for messing about outdoors too, and brings back memories of seeing Triang System3 track and it’s TT3 equivalent of many years ago.

So after getting run in, they moved to the pending pile and basic disassembly took place, to see the decoder installation . And then it went to quite a lot of disassembly to start weathering and a renumber for both of them. As usual I wanted an in use look to them and having worked out how to get the cabs off I thought the rear cab shutters would be good opened up on one of them.

That’s where the commitment takes place. Once you start, that’s it, you’re in for the hard yards. This looks a bit crude and brutal but it achieves a possibly unique version. I’ve seen weathered examples which have retained an unmodified body so this one or pair will look different. New shutter doors will be needed, probably brass or nickel silver, and will capture a working locomotive and critically add more character to it. The other thing I’ve done is painted the LED light for the firebox brown. That has made it far less obtrusive, and when you do notice it it’s a far more realistic colour.

So this has now reached the stage where Fox numberplates will be fitted, and then there’s the coupling choice. Dinghams look favourite, but recently myself and a friend have been trying DG couplings, as they show potential for the Forest project. There’s a few other tweaks in mind not least of which is ensuring a well matched decoder for good running qualities and controllability.

That’s of course unless I get distracted. We’re back to the commitments again…