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).

I know I ought to be concentrating on repairing locomotives in the order I acquired them, but since the Duke of Gloucester runs so well without its repairs I feel bad touching it when others in my collection are suffering more. Take the Peppercorn A1 “Tornado” for example. I acquired this locomotive and it arrived in poor cosmetic state due to being partially crushed in the post, as well as being a slightly inconsistent runner when going backward. Here’s a quick look at the locomotive’s current state.

It’s a pretty striking locomotive, side on — if you ignore the fact the tender is in two parts. That said, this should be an easy fix. What isn’t so obvious in this photo, however, is the damage this locomotive has had to each end.

Neither coupling exists any more — both appear to have shattered in transit. This means that it can’t pull or push rakes of carriages at all. The front buffer beam has been pushed into the main body, causing one side to buckle slightly and both the buffers have snapped internally. Neither smoke deflector stays attached while running although this can easily be fixed with some glue. In fact, due to the amount of repairs it requires, I’ve actually created a repairs and accessories group for my parts list which is already pushing the estimated price up somewhat.

There’s a lot going for this locomotive — it runs pretty smoothly when it does run — but the task of restoring it to its righteous glory is daunting and, asides from one other locomotive I’ve yet to mention on the site, feels like it will be one of the hardest challenges for me going forwards.