Ryedown Lane – Locomotives and stock part 3

Like a lot of modellers, I suppose my main interest has always been in locomotives. In the nearly two decades since I returned to the hobby seriously, I’ve built up a sizeable and varied collection of locomotives, mostly from kits, not all of which are ideally suited to an English narrow gauge light railway set in the 1930s. Carriages and wagons often take second place and I know one or two very talented modellers who will happily spend hundreds of hours building and fettling complex brass locomotive kits yet have little or no interest in building the accompanying rolling stock. Personally, I’ve found constructing the carriages and wagons used on Ryedown Lane at least as interesting as building the motive power.

The first carriages that I built in 009 were various Parkside Dundas (as it then was) four wheelers, including two or three of the Glyn Valley Tramway carriages. Nice as they are matched up with a Beyer Peacock tram engine, they weren’t what I had in mind for a light railway supposedly opened in the first couple of years of the twentieth century. I turned instead to the same manufacturer’s Vale of Rheidol bogie carriages, the prototypes of which were of course built for a genuine two foot gauge light railway.

                                                Vale of Rheidol carriage built very much as the maker intended.

Like the majority of Dundas kits, the basic carriage is a delight to build and looked good with the Vale  of Rheidol four-wheel brake van that I’d already built.  However, having built two of the kits as the makers intended, I decided that I really wanted to operate two car trains without a separate brake van, so looked at ways of bashing the kit to provide a brake compo. The matchboard sides of the prototype make the job of cutting and shutting relatively easy, especially if one also uses a mitre block. Using this method, I cut four compartments from a pair of carriage sides and spliced them to a pair of brake van sides, which gave a nicely proportioned brake carriage body of the same length as the chassis. Having constructed the two previous two carriages as all thirds I decided to provide at least some accommodation for the better off clientele of the Wessex Light Railway and installed a partition turning the new carriage into a brake compo.

               The brake compo bash, achieved by combining the V of R carriage with the four wheel brake van body                       on the bogie underframe.

The off cuts from the bogie carriage sides left enough material to match up with the ends, roof and underframe of the brake van kit to provide a rather neat four-wheel carriage.

                                 The four wheel carriage built from the carriage off cuts mounted on the brake                                                               van underframe. I quite fancy building some more of these .

This was an enjoyable kit bash. I’m far from being the first person to do this conversion and there are numerous different ways to cut the carriage and van sides to provide a plethora of different combinations. Currently I’m working on a permanent loft layout which incorporates an 009 section representing another part of the Wessex Light Railway and which will give me the space to operate longer trains so we may yet need to bash another brake carriage.