I mentioned in another thread that at long last we have a means of reproducing the ubiquitous English Electric Type 3 Co-Co in Z. These long lived locos were first introduced in 1960, ordered straight off the drawing board into production many of these are still in traffic today and at the railway company I work for we are still sending them through main works for major overhauls to support the Passenger companies we provide locos and coaching stock to. 37 407 has not been long out of Derby works and was on display at our recent Crewe open day Now these locos looked dated even as they came out but have stood the test of time as many other classes fell by the wayside. It means that, like the F7s in the States, they have been painted in a bewildering variety of colour schemes over the decades. Starting in BR green. this photo taken by my father shows the original plain green with the small yellow end warning panel. This sad picture shows D6800 on a works train lifting the Great Central main line after its closure which deprived the U.K of the only main line built to the Continental loading gauge. Folly on a grand scale! So the model has been designed by Ivan Industries on Shapeways with assistance from Graham Jones and was designed to use a Marklin donor loco The BR 103 stood behind the bodyshell in its first coat of Grey 'reveal' primer has no idea what is going to happen to it there were some marked layer lines on the nose ends that needed cleaning up and some 'echo' lines under the grills that also required a bit of scraping and sanding but in the main as a print it was not bad at all with the 103 bodyshell discarded the locating lugs on the cast part of the chassis were ground off I'm not too worried about the dust as the whole cassis is going in the ultrasonic cleaning bath after more in a mo Kev
Most U.k locos taper in at the nose end to clear station platforms so the plastic ends of the chassis need a trim A quick scrape removes any burrs left behind test fit Most importantly the red centres to the wheels were painted very dark grey as they stick out like a sore thumb with the railblue applied and the yellow warning ends Kev
Now the loco I'm doing is one of the infamous Tinsley depot ones. Tinsley TMD was a big loco depot in Sheffield, Yorkshire that maintained a variety of locos including 08 shunters, class 20s, lots of Class 47s and the class 37s and was adjacent to the huge Tinsley Hump marshalling yard that served the many steelworks and coalmines in the area. The thing that set Tinsley apart was their practice of applying unofficial names to many of the locos including the 37s. The fitters on the lunchbreaks would carefully hand paint replica nameplates on the sides of the locos. The loco I chose to model was 37 013 'Vampire' which was till in Railblue although quite weathered by this stage. Paint is Humbrol acrylic Railblue with Tamiya yellow ends. Precision decals are doing full loco sets for the Tinsley named locos to 2mm scale, so slightly big but I can live with it. These decals also include the Tinsley 'White rose' depot symbols seen shunting the steel yard on Republic The buffers came form a marklin donor loco. The cabside windows are glazed with thin polycarbonate sheet, the rest of the windows are done with Krystal Klear. The bearing covers have been painted yello and the red dot at the nose end is the fire extinguisher button. I will add the windscreen wipers when I can get psyched up to do it. I haven't got the heart to weather this one.
Now the thing that might interest our continental cousins is that a lot of these locos spent time working in France, Italy and Spain as these countries developed their high speed lines working on ballast trains and delivering construction materials. No less than 56 of these were sent over. Some returned and some did not. The reason they were so useful in Spain is that their rail gauge is 5 ft 6 inch and the new high speed lines were to be standard gauge so they had no freight locos suitable one that did return after some time in storage at Villafrancea was 37 703 still carrying its 'Continental rail' colour scheme and its L25 number seen here in the Deltic preservation society shed at Barrow Hill roundhouse after repatriation Those of you have seen my posts on the International railways forum on trainboard know that I have got a lot of videos of 37s on my youtube channel particularly as we run Class 37/4s on the Cumbrian Coast railways and until recently used them on our specialised freight traffic trains to and from Sellafield. But on some of the other forums over here there is a big increase in interest in the Tinsley locos. Now I took hundreds of photos there in the 1990s on my lunch breaks and working as a sports photographer at the time I had a bag of cameras and BIG lenses and lots of E6 colour transparency film which helped. far too many to upload to the web as photos so I have assembled the Tinsley 37 images as a slide show which if you are interested you can find here Kev
Interresting (and sad outcome indeed). What was the reason for building of this line with continental gauge ? Dom
...And speaking of the BR103 chassis it looks like it's too short, its trucks seeming way too inwards. Didn't you think using an AZL SD70 or a MTL SD4062 chassis for example, even with the need of trimming their upper parts ? Dom
I agree its a bit short but when running on the layout at a show it is not that apparent. The next two will be in BR large logo livery and ill have the mini snowploughs which will make it less apparent as well (Hopefully) I've got two undec SD40-2s coming from Anthony now but one chassis is going back under the Class 66 (which got robbed for the Deltic) and othr is going to re-instate the BN SD40-2 with sound that has been in a pile of bits for ages But... I'm going to have a look to see what else the chassis might fit The thing is that the BR 103/151 is plentiful and cheap if you get them off ebay.de so the compromise is not so bad
