When I first purchased the Duke of Gloucester model, the previous owner advised me that it had missing buffers. The front right buffer was crushed and one of the rear tender buffers was missing. After a while of having it, I noticed that part of the valve gear mechanism that connects to the middle driving wheel was missing as well. This causes the connecting rods between the wheels to wiggle a lot when moving and may be contributing to the overall locomotive’s uneven movement.

Initially, I thought I could repair these myself. I managed to straighten up the metal parts of the crushed front buffer and started looking at paints to ensure the colours matched when put back on. I’d got pretty close and was ready to glue it back in. I’d also managed to get a sacrificial valve gear mechanism from an online store to take parts from to try and at least stabilise the Duke’s mechanism somewhat.

Unfortunately if you look closely at the locomotive’s body, there’s a lot of detailing damage. The handrails are completely loose from the body and seem to be held on only by willpower, the whistle is missing and there are odd white marks all over the place. I’d taken the body off (like I have done with the Tornado) in preparation for some serious work, when I saw this for sale.

I’m not one to quit things like this, but you’ll notice that this body is different from the one in the image at the beginning of this article. That’s because it’s from a higher-detail model — a non-RailRoad variant of the Duke of Gloucester. Hornby’s RailRoad range is aimed at people new to the hobby and will be cheaper, but due to this are simpler and lack detailing. The interesting thing about Hornby’s Duke of Gloucester models is that the RailRoad and non-RailRoad variants only differ by the locomotive body. Due to this, I didn’t hesitate to pick up the higher detail body to replace the damaged one with, especially since these are harder to find. I’ve put the replacement body onto the chassis now and am keeping the damaged one to work on, on the off chance I can use my artistic skills to make it look even better than the replacement one.

There’s a few other repairs I have lined up for this model, which I’ll be doing in the future, but after this replacement I think the Duke is one of the most spectacular-looking locomotives in my fleet.

I’ve had a little time to work on the Peppercorn A1 “Tornado” today, after some of the spare pieces I ordered arrived.

I’ve managed to straighten out the bent front beam by submerging the front of the locomotive in boiling water and pulling it forward. I’ve also replaced the shattered buffers with new ones and added on a detailing pack so it looks a bit more like the real locomotive. I now need to 3D print a replacement front ladder, give it a quick lick of paint and it should be OK to go again!

I’ve spent the better part of this weekend working with wood. I’m currently working on the upper part of the frame, which provides the majority of the support to the two baseboard pieces. This frame is the main one that gets connected to the legs and raised up to vaguely table height.

Since this frame attaches to the baseboard, I’ve had to clear away the layout for now. It’s disappeared into a set of boxes for now (which has helped with filling out the missing images in the parts list!)

I woke up quite early on Saturday morning in order to visit the local wood recycling centre and picked up several metres of 3×1.5 timber pieces — I’d wanted 3×2 pieces, but they didn’t have enough of that size in. They have a basic cutting machine there, but cannot guarantee accuracy in terms of length so I took a few estimated lengths and brought them home to finish off with my own saw.

The frame I’m building uses four primary support beams to hold the baseboard pieces together. Between these four beams are three “lanes” of smaller beams to help keep the space between the primary beams equal. While the recycling centre could easily give me timber for the main supports, the little spacer beams needed to be cut from a set of longer pieces.

I have a wood saw but, without any way to secure anything, all it did was make the beams slide about as opposed to cutting them. Unfortunately, this meant that I had to cut everything with a much smaller hacksaw.

While the wood was pretty decent quality, the edges were a bit on the rough side. I went to my local hardware shop and picked up a wood planing tool to help smooth them off. For reference, this is a solid metal tool with a slit in it where an adjustable blade sits. When you run it up and down the beam, it takes off any uneven surfaces. I mainly used it to chamfer off the edges of the wood, where splinters were starting to appear.

Once all the wood was cut to size, I started thinking about how to keep the pieces together. The easiest option was to use dowels and screws. I drilled holes into the ends of the spacer beams and slotted in some dowels. I then drilled holes in the support beams to put the dowels and slotted the spacer beams in them. This should hold the beams together with enough force to add the baseboard and screw the whole lot together. I’m also looking to get some corner braces to help reinforce the joins.

Unfortunately, I don’t have enough screws to complete the frame currently so that means another trip to the hardware store over the week so that I can try and complete this section next weekend. More carpentry updates to come!

Mainly work on trying to get the Tornado working without its DCC chip. This is the chassis without the body applied.

There’s aslo been a considerable amount of work getting wood for the table: more on that tomorrow.

I took the body off the Tornado to get a closer look at the damaged front beams and uncovered a little surprise.

This tiny board is a Digital Command Control chip, which is a key part of the digital control systems for model railways. Essentially, it allows you to control trains with a computer, rather than a dial on a box.

I’m not in the market to upgrade my fleet to digital control so I’m taking it out, but it was an interesting find, especially since the previous owner had said nothing about it (and may not have known).