On 5696Arethusa's bench

3 weeks ago I got the Mailcoach LNER Coronation kits, something I've been maening to do for some time so a start has well and truly been made.
The kits are very old being former Ian Kirk kits before he moved on to brass so the quality is not the best but I'll see that the finished train is "toplink"
As wheels, bearings and couplings are not supplied I've cheated on the bogies smewhat and purchased a joblot of Bachmann Thompson bogies off of ebay and used these instead, at least I know these are true so the running is top draw. For the shared bogie the tension lock coupling was cut off and two posts were glued to the top of the bogie to fit inside a hole just inside the end of the coach.

At the outer ends of each twin a 40thou piece of plasticard was glued to the top of the bogie and drilled out in the centre to accept the retainer screw.

Because this set is going to be run on layouts that have set track curves the space over the shared bogies is rather large, the method of reducing this gap suggested in the instructions is to make the flexible fairing on the real coaches out of the supplied self adesive foam. This foam is the stuff you used tobe able to buy on rolls to put round your old windows to stop the wind blowing in, I found this to be unacceptable so had to come up withan alternative.
A little head scrathing later and I had the sollution, actually it was while I was trying to get some ZZZZ so that was another nights sleep ruined, still as Bon Jovi put it "I'll sleep when I'm Dead"
The sollution was simplicity itself, I cut two peices of 15thou to the shape of the coach end and cut a slot4/5 of the way up the middle. On the coach ends I glued a strip of 1mm X 3.2mm with a rounded top and onto that I glued a 10mm wide piece of 15thou. You can probably see where this is going. The two pieces of plastic the shape of the coach end were then held 8mm apart and had a 12mm wide piece of an old pair of black tights (supplied by she who must be obeyed) glued around the edges. Then all that is needed is to slip this over the plastic glued to the ends of the coaches and hey presto the gap is gone, whats more this still allows the coaches to be split for ease of handling.

New Bachmann coach wheels have also been purchased and a start on painting them has been made and I think these will really set the train off nicely, it's one of those details that won't really be seen but would be missed if it wasn't there.

The four twins have all but been finished just need their roofs fitting then it's ready for the paintshop, weather permitting.

That's all for now, I'd better get back to them or they'll never get finished.