Seans workbench thing

[Sean]

as mentioned on the other thread, ive been trying to increase the amount of cie stock ive got without spending too much money so ive been looking for ways to convert existing stock to cie without too much effort/expense.

Ive picked out a range of stuff from my collection that I can see will easily convert into cie stock  so im starting this thread to keep track of what I do, The majority of the stock I am working with is available cheaply in some form or other on the hornby railroad range in some guise or is available in abundance second hand. Surprisingly I think I have enough stock here to fill out the layout with the exception of a larger diesel engine which is one thing i reckon I will just buy when funds allow.

Interestingly the cheap hornby wagons seem to all come built on one of two common chassis, this actually helps quite a lot as can be seen later in the thread. the teign valley wagon is a bit more detailed and seems to have its own individual chassis but aesthetically its the quite close to cie wagon photos so its in for this job.

so these are the first few wagons that seem the simplest  to turn into Irish stock. the van and 5 plank wagon I am just going to respray into grey, later on  I will add cie decals but its not a job for today, the grey brake van can pretty much stay the same until decal day as its not a million miles from an irish van it may get some body mods in the future but its okay as is for now. I couldnt decide on a colour for the brown brake van so its staying brown for now. It is however being moved from the long Hornby wagon chassis to the short one. im not sure how accurate this will be from an Irish standpoint , but it will make shunting a bit more interesting on my layout and im not a huge fan of brake vans with the open platform on either end anyway.

 

getting this stuff apart is all very straight forward with plastic clips located on the underside to get the bodys off on a few seconds.  the entire wagon including chassis is being painted grey with details to be added back on afterwards on order to reflect on the colour of the cie wagon,  the vans seemed to mostly keep black chassis so this will be left alone for now. once the van is off its chassis we can see its the very same as the other short chassis which I will be moving the brake van onto. I have a few more coal wagons built on this shorter chassis which would also be suited to conversion although in my opinion they do not look as good.

for paint I have chosen the very versatile Dealz primer grey rattlecans, I think the colour should be okay, if not at least they can be primed to take the correct colour.

 

as we wait for this to dry its time to tackle the brake van,

in theory it should just clip onto one chassis from the other as they are sold new like that,but we will see.

 

unfortunately not, but a little dab of model glue onto each corner sorted that out easily.

 

 

as the glue dried and the rest of the stuff went back together i put some small details back onto the wagon so it doesnt just look like a primed wagon.

 

 

now the imaginary hornby cie tank engine finally has some appropriate rolling stock to pull behind it, will surely look good when detailed with decals etc.

 

New shortened brake is looking right at home behind the tanker train.

 

I have one more item of freight stock  to start building before i start to focus on passenger stock. the four wheel coaches I am intending on turning into some sort of heritage train in cie green. the cleaning car has long since had its cleaning mechanism removed and the blanked out windows will make it convert into a nice little brake coach, these all run on the long hornby chassis and are available for next to nothing all over ebay.

 

 

 

 

Edited July 7, 2023 by Sean

[Sean]

So the reason i had been keeping an eye on the wagon chassis size is because i am considering container traffic on my layout  and have ordered some oo guage 20 foot containers as I think they should fit just nicely on a large hornby wagon chassis if my measurements are correct.

 

Unable to wait I found some HO guage containers that i could print out and make up on card,  unfortunately i am limited to grayscale printing on blue card so they dont look amazing but give me an idea what to expect when the plastic ones get here.

 

much to my surprise these fit really well onto the smaller chassis with just a little overlap, if it was scaled down just a tiny bit it would fit onto this flat perfectly and look great.(and of course printed on proper card in colour)

unfortunately the container is a bit too short for the larger chassis but according to my measurements the oo containers should make up the extra cm and fill the bed, I think it would also be possible to take a lot of the underside plastic off this chassis with an exacto knife so it looks more like a proper container skeleton as well so it will be interesting to see how these progress next week.

 

they do look half good being pulled out of the yard in a rake though. the great thing about working with either of these wagon chassis is that hornby sell a 3 pack of them for 20 pounds on their website  and there are a lot of used wagons on ebay etc which would suit for these types of conversions.

 

Edited August 8, 2020 by Sean

[jhb171achill]

I love your ingenuity, Sean, by making such a variety like this! Well done, keep it up.

[Sean]

thanks for the feedback, for years ive wanted to set up an irish layout but always found it to be a little too costly starting out so hopefully this thread can encourage others who are in the same boat, I will probabaly pull the finger out now and finally buy one of the big diesels soon enough.

interesting enough set on the workbench today.

 

I have owned this set of tri ang coaches for many years, they were given to me by my grandad but i was never able to properly run them on my modern track due to them having very primative wheelsets which i did not know how to change causing them to derail almost always on points.

 

Well recently i discovered how to change these wheels . so i have been thinking it would be nice to refurbish this set into cie black and tan in order to run on my layout . it has a few things going for it.

 

the open coach is not a million miles from one of the opens in the silver fox 1951 set  so in theory they wouldnt look too out of place in that livery,

i think the brake van would be technically incorrect but i could later run it with some mark 2's as a heating van if i wanted to.

there are lines molded into the bodywork  which can be used as a template for masking off for the multi colour paint job and even with my skills it should turn out half decent.

when compared to my set of hornby composite coaches these seem to be made to a slightly smaller scale. they are a bit shorter and the roof height isnt exactly the same either. this makes the track look a tiny bit bigger but more importantly space is at a premium in my station area and the missing inch or 2 of wheelbase does help a lot with clearance issues  in the runaround loop. this is generally the longest train that will ever run on the layout anyway.

 

due to the wheel issues they seem to be very commonly available for around 5-10 pounds  online so there are loads of them out there, it is also a bit of a pain to fit modern wheels but its actually very straight forward without buying any additional bushings etc.

 

Another thing i noticed whilst browsing the silver fox library was that their 6 wheel heating van seems to sit on another common hornby chassis which i actually happen to have in my posession in the form of the milk van , it seems to have the same black bed details as the silver fox van as well as the couplings which pivot with the middle wheel turning, so this seems like an ideal oppertunity to try and create my own 6 wheeler! We will revisit this another day as the coaches have absorbed all of my modelling time today and ive only painted one side of them as im taking my time with them. im still deciding wether to just repaint this one or somehow try to cut in for the windows so ill sleep on it. and decide.

 

 

masking was a piece of cake as i could just lay the tape down along the plastic lines of the carriage so it was easy to know they were straight.

 

much to my amusement i was able to simply fold the masking tape back up and i was masked for orange. I couldnt find any obvious way to take these apart and the bogies are riveted on so this is why the roof and bogies are masked instead of removed.

 

no pics of the actual paint job, and only one side of the coaches was completed today however I do think they are looking good on the layout

need to go back and tidy up some of the lines when the paint dries, particularly between the orange and black as there was no fixing it with the paint wet, the black section was painted freehand as i could not think of any obvious way to mask up the windows, they had fallen in though so i was able to paint most of the frames without touching the glass with my brush all that much. i reckon these will look really decent tidied up with some more details added.

 

really pleased with the results of what i have achieved on this thread so far in just a few short evenings i think i have drastically changed the look and feel of the layout i have planned  with more of an idea of how to actually build the layout to the strenghts of my new rolling stock. Will keep this thread updated as i hone my skills and begin to improve on the wagons here so far.

As a bonus, I have come accross and old HO chassis which i thought i had destroyed forever as a child today, then i came accross its motor and driveshaft and noticed the pickups are still in place, once i wire it all up i may have to see about treating her to a shapeways 121 shell. are there any other 121 shells available?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 9, 2020 by Sean

[jhb171achill]

I love the way you're thinking, Sean!

You've the black'n'tan 1960s coaches, but you also have three 4-wheeled "old" coaches in the background. A CIE green repaint would have the three looking sufficiently "1950s". 

The very old British coaches, if sold as they are, might raise funds to buy an actual Irish model, e.g.a "Craven" if you can get one on fleabay.....

 

Edited August 9, 2020 by jhb171achill

[Galteemore]

Really good effort here Sean - and it's clear you are finding this fun and rewarding which is critical to sticking at it! If you haven’t got this book, I’d recommend it....https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9781857801859/Modelling-Irish-Railways-Johnson-Stephen-1857801857/plp

Published before much Irish RTR was available, it gives a good introduction to some simple conversions. Also search the back issues here to see what some folk have done...https://newirishlines.org/

That 6w chassis could make a nice coach too, if you wanted to cut and shut some of your 4w bodies...,.

Edited August 9, 2020 by Galteemore

[burnthebox]

Very well done Sean, that’s modelling in every sense, & for what it’s worth, there’s a tip on here somewhere about spraying & removing masking tape, that says to use a Blow Gun or a Hairdryer...!!
BTB

[Sean]

Some great resources there lads should keep me reading for a while

@jhb171achill the carriages im working on seem to be pretty common and available for next to nothing online, i do have a couple of larger steam sets and a graham farish set and a few other goodies im strongly considering parting with at the moment though.

 

not too much to report today as im tied up with other committments however I have gotten  a little start on the heat van.

 

like most things hornby this clipped apart with ease, still undecided about how to add a window and door at this stage, im torn between finding a very cheap damaged coach to use as a donor and just trying my hand at cutting them in when i find my dremel in the shed again.

 

fairly drastic step next. but im completley sanding down the wagon  on all 4 sides on a block of wood to deface it.

that is then repeated on a nicer bit of sandpaper as 120 grit will have it left feeling a bit rough.

So now ive basically got a blank canvas for a new carriage! decided to give it a coat of  high build primer to start to fill in the heavy sanding job and highlight any imperfections left behind .

ive got to take some more measurements but interestingly it has left the doors of the old wagon behind and these dont seem like they are a million miles away from where they should be.Could be onto somthing with this.

[Sean]

 

so among my old bits was this other little gem it used to form part of a fairly big breakdown crane on a one of the old ho sets i had as a child. plenty of doors and 2 little vent details i can use later, time to get my blunt cutting tool out.

 

roughly 5 minutes later it has been hacked into a load of old doors and panels. childhood ruined.

was looking for ways to easily cut into this wagon so i heated up the exacto knife with my lighter and it went through like butter,  once i had the door in i got a little more confident and cut in the first window! not perfectly but tidied up with the bit of card.

 

mistakes were made on the other side too!

 

thank goodness for fillers when i get back to this ill use the masking tape all the way around the wagon following the lines of the windows i cut,

 

i dont need them to be perfectly square(although it would be a bonus ha) as long as i dont cut them too big to ruin the lines of the livery. the exacto knife is able to make shave out a surprisingly square looking cut out though.

[Sean]

containers arrived today, they arent an exact fit for the large hornby bed. but its close enough for my layout

and they do set a nice scene alongside the coaches.

managed to get the windows cut into the heating van and they arent looking all that bad after tidying, this unit should paint up nicely , i took the plastic screen off an old broken thermometer and this should make up the window glaze nicely when cut into small pieces..

Edited August 10, 2020 by Sean

[Sean]

as im a bit of a glutton for punishment ive started to piece together another familliar face, thought i was done making trains for now but this small pile of parts kept sticking its tongue out at me so i said i had better make use of them.

not gonna be aiming for a super detailed example again although there are some elements which I want to spend additional time on such as getting the curve into the front of the cab and rear correct.

a

even has a lit cab! i should be able to think up a little circuit to keep it lit for a few seconds after the train comes to a halt.

van is looking really well although not too photogenic at the moment with my poor lighting, will update tomorrow when i finish that one off altogether. quite looking forward to getting the windows fixed in after paint. this is its good side and most likely the side ill use the details on. other side is not terrible but it was done first and details like the door just didnt come in as flush as i could get them on this side,overall im very pleased with this van though,only thing annoying me is that this van is sitting slightly higher than the coaches and therefore the orange stripe is sitting a little too high and i imagine the white one will too, i think its partly because of the small scale of those tri ang coaches though so may be okay next to some proper irish stock.

 

overall im happy with my little DIY branch line rake.

 

[Galteemore]

This is one of the most interesting threads on here right now. Chris Klein, who is a very skilled modeller with his own firm making O gauge locos : https://www.minervamodelrailways.co.uk

has 3 rules:

 

1. Model railways are fun

2. It’s your railway so run what you want to 

3. Any model railway is better than no model railway 

What you are doing fits all those ! Wish I’d done something like this years ago. It’s like some of those early Model Railway Constructor articles...inspiring effort.

 

[Sean]

van is done and the windows are in, needs the usual bit of touch up where the masking tape bled but overall its a good little van.

 

since i had to make sure the new loco chassis was still able to be fixed up and ran I was motivated to finally wire up my little line, so now we have the new little e class moving under its own power handling an outgoing container run, who said the hornby 0-4-0 isnt capable of a crawl?? (admittedly mine definitely needs a bit of a service though it hasnt had a proper run in a few years now and neither has this track) This one is completley stock but i believe they can be modded for rather smooth crawling indeed.

Edited August 14, 2020 by Sean

[Sean]

containers roll back in clearing the line for the goods train to roll out, think its about time i put together a fiddle yard.

[JasonB]

On 8/13/2020 at 8:04 AM, Galteemore said:

This is one of the most interesting threads on here right now.

Couldn't agree more. Great use of some relatively inexpensive models. Always nice to see some old school modelling.  

[Sean]

not done much on the modelling front as Ive been dedicating my spare time into trying to get some kinda playable layout together. made a little progress with 121 but i wanna play trains soon!

 

 

got this old class 101 on ebay a good few years ago in the condition its in here, not the best of paint jobs and the thing barely creaked when put onto a powered track as the wheels were black, its running decently now though after a good clean and lubing. seeing examples of this set on ebay for around £30-40  so its another one thats easily picked up, it does have those ugly large flange wheels again though.

kk

I reckon it would not be too difficult to turn it into one of these AEC 2600 railcars, conversion to a one pillar windscreen would be the main thing and the headlight setup, but the gear under the carriage would also need to be changed (not too difficult with some plasticard) the main standout detail would be the profile of the roof but it could be moulded into a more roud profile if i was inclined later....

 

the door and window layout isnt far off

Edited August 19, 2020 by Sean

[Sean]

 

noted from info on here that the open plank wagons werent all nessesarily the same size in a given train so decided to bash out my last 3 wagons into cie livery ex thomas the tank engine this time, did not yet add the buffer details but they definitely look missing in comparison to the front wagon, I think the brake van is definitely needing to go grey now as well.

dying to increase my fleet of these vans,  followed by a few of the oil tankers, one is an old triang model with modern wheels and the other is another thomas the tank engine model but they are both essentially the same tanker. model

[Sean]

 

AEC under construction...... will do a more detailed post when doing the power car. quite a straight forward conversion. still havent painted the other side of those coaches lol. and yes, this is going to be made go around those 18" curves

Edited August 21, 2020 by Sean

[JasonB]

Progressing well. Nice work. 

[Sean]

 

finishing up some coaching stock tonight. hopefully all masked around the same heights not as many guide lines on the dmu but followed a guide on here for keeping the striping in line so should be ok, the + shape on the doors seems to be at the same level as the guide on the other carriage white top stripe is the same height but a different width on the dmu

 

Unfortunately there is no clear way to easily get the glass out  of the coach so unfortunately it will take a little bit of extra time to paint around all the windows etc

Edited August 24, 2020 by Sean

[Sean]

as usual the orange band will need sharpening up when the paint dries,as well as the white bit at the front(although the camera is slightly exaggerating that)  but overall gotta say im really pleased with the looks of this one. already passing the 2 foot rule with flying colours and satisfys that dmu desire on the layout.

 

Edited August 25, 2020 by Sean

[Sean]

 

AEC back together and being pushed by its power bogie, paint tidied up a little bit. this should be a great little runner if crawling like this on a standard hornby controller

 

This design is decades old but after cleaning up the wheels and loosening it up its quickly becoming one of my favourite motors that i own. that double worm drive seems to be putting loads of power down too. nice to be able to watch the open motor in action too.  Can anybody point me towards proper servicing info for these motors? it was a bit seized and barely running  since i bought it a few years ago but think it might deserve a proper service after coming back to life so nicely.

 

[Sean]

 

well this is rather unexpected.............

 

 

but a running g class has been cobbled together.....

the only space to put the weights was into the cab,  so now it wobbles at high speeds, probabaly just like the real thing XD.

 

the 121 i started earlier in the thread wasnt really interesting me anymore, i had used the wrong type of plasticard for the job and it would never work on this layout anyway, and besides i can buy a nice one of them if i really want to..

so i dismantled it for the cab and body parts to form a new loco and noticed the bogies would come out easily, and when they came out i noticed that they were both the exact same moulding of plastic casing except one is wired for power pickup and the other has gears inside to drive 2 of the axles so i soon realised i could install the pickups onto the drive pickup without any mods at all (the bogie has all wheel pickup now). the problem now is that there is a swivel joint between the motor and the gearbox that moves the motor into the center of the chassis but after some fiddling i can see that with the plastic joint pulled off the gearbox shaft  its the same sized shaft as the motor, so i start to wonder if i can just press this motor into the gearbox and leave it sitting ontop of the bogie to run things.

 

so at this point i decide to pry the gearbox apart, there is a worm gear driving a small litle gearbox to drive 2 axles. i pressed the shaft off the wormgear and much to my delight the motor pressed straight on,  and this is where we run into issues as i cannot get fit the motor onto the side of the gearbox without it sitting at a bad angle that would stop the mechanism from working anyway.

I ended up grinding away the side of the plastic gearbox until the motor was sitting ontop of it with the shaft pointing straight into the box at a perfect angle. this meant i had to discard a gear and the bogie is now only one axle drive, but it was probabaly the only way to make things work.

next problem the bogie had traction tyres in the past but they are long gone, so i reassemble using a drive axle and a pickup axle, and it works, but is wheelspin crazy, the loco is barely moving..... to combat this i have taken a couple of measures, the old chassis had a 50g weight from the factory, I reused this within the new loco, it was too big to fit in so i had to cut it in half and hot glue it into the cab body. the other thing thing was to replace the old traction tyre wheels with 2 off of the spare pickup axle as i dont think i could reliably run any tyres on this yoke now regardless. they literally just pressed off the spare pickup axle and onto the drive axle. its kinda funny now, cos if you jam the speed open too fast on the controller the little loco is more than capable of doing a little wheelie or flipping itself over! only when you rapidly go from like 0-70% speed in a second or somthing though, its perfectly usable at slow speeds otherwise. just need to add couplings too it now the modelling can wait till another night, didnt expect to get the mechanics done so fast like that anyway.

 

steps and buffers will need to be sourced from some other scrap heap. although im begging to run out of scrap heaps!

 

Edited August 27, 2020 by Sean

[Sean]

 

since id already taken an axle from the 0-4-0 to work into the e class at some stage, i thought id cut out the coupling blocks and hot glue them in. working a treat. ready to model and paint the thing now.

 

really a quirky kinda loco, i could see the sort of narrow gauge but on big track look growing on me.

 

so now that i have 3 locos i can run on the layout im gonna focus on finishing off the stock i do have, and then at some stage when i do get a chance i will probabaly bulk buy a number of dapol vent van kits and oil tankers. that seems like more than enough to play with for a while

 

[David Holman]

Dare I say that all this fun you are having with 4mm scale would translate very well into 7mm narrow gauge!

On a slightly serious note 0n16.5 has much to offer anyone who enjoys model bashing, especially if freelancing. Second hand stalls provide a wealth of materials, while right curves and tension lock couples look fine. Plus you can build a 7mm narrow gauge layout in pretty much the same space as an 00 one.

 Worth remembering for the future, though looks like plenty of fun is being had with the current project to want to change any time soon.

[Sean]

On 8/28/2020 at 8:52 AM, David Holman said:

Dare I say that all this fun you are having with 4mm scale would translate very well into 7mm narrow gauge!

On a slightly serious note 0n16.5 has much to offer anyone who enjoys model bashing, especially if freelancing. Second hand stalls provide a wealth of materials, while right curves and tension lock couples look fine. Plus you can build a 7mm narrow gauge layout in pretty much the same space as an 00 one.

 Worth remembering for the future, though looks like plenty of fun is being had with the current project to want to change any time soon.

I have an oval of n guage track and I would be lying if i said i hadnt been trying to work in 009 somewhere on the layout but  thinking about it now it was pie in the sky.

just had to google 0n16.5  as im not familliar with it and it sounds very interesting alright. found this chassis which can be gotten quite cheap and sits on whats looking like that 0-4-0 which my loco box is full of.  looks like it may be yet another condender for a 4mm g class conversion, now youve gotten me thinking

not much done on the actual modelling front since ive been working on and playing with the layout itself more but i did get around to finishing off a conflat today by removing the footboards etc that are usually present on the long hornby wagons. and cut it down to have more similar apparatus to an actual 20 foot skeleton. the plastic was very easy to cut through with the normal craft knifes.

it actually cleaned the look up a good bit,  a couple of the mroe delicate details i could of kept got broken so i just cut them off.

 

 

since this yoke really is just a cobbled together lump of plastic and hot glue its needed a few adjustments internally to improve the workings of my home made mechanism and so i havent done too much modelling work on it.  i have done a few cosmetic adjustments as ive been rebuilding the insides of it again and again, I did add some buffers tonight though and redistributed the weights around the caband its running more and more reliably all the time.  I think the next step will be adding the 2 little headlamps on the flootplate at the front.

 

cutting out the right sized windows however may be problematic as the cab has a few large bits of metal inside so not sure how im gonna deal with that just yet.

[Sean]

at 6/7 quid plus a lick of paint. the dapol self build/unpainted van line definitely ticking all the boxes for cie stock on the cheap. just got to make sure the tighter couplings will work on the layout before i go buying more.

[Sean]

thats a grand looking wagon and the couplings seem almost better than the hornby ones, in any case i can tilt them slightly to suit my curves but they mix grand with hornby ones without any modding for the curves.

 

Since switching from the hornby to a non pwm bacmann train controller, i must say the g class has improved 100% in its slow running and is going to be used a lot more often due to this now.

 

still havent been motivated to start the2600 power car but its one of the last bits of stock for a while...... finished off the conflats when all that is said and done im gonna focus on weathering a little, as one of my building kits featured a weathering guide that looks fairly straight forward and not too hard.

[Mayner]

On 9/4/2020 at 11:47 PM, Sean said:

at 6/7 quid plus a lick of paint. the dapol self build/unpainted van line definitely ticking all the boxes for cie stock on the cheap. just got to make sure the tighter couplings will work on the layout before i go buying more.

The Kitmaster/Airfix cattle wagon and oil tank wagons were one of my staples for Irish wagons when I was started modelling.

I used to do odd sorts of things with the tank wagons shortening the tanks and mounting them on Trix wagon chassis and converting the chassis to carry Triang-Hornby 20' containers by chopping the chassis in two, shortening the length and re-joining. More recently I re-built Dapol tank wagons to resemble the ESSO Sligo oil train wagons by extending the tank barrel at each end with sections cut from a spare barrel, the joints are barely noticable once sanded down with wet and dray paper.

The Dapol versions come with the added bonus of decent wheels and tension, the kits are a relatively cheap and quick way of churning out rakes of wagons, until fairly recently the Dapol kit was the best option for modelling the British Railways 16t mineral wagon, I still have a rake of about 20 Airfix/Dapol mineral wagons somewhere.

 

Edited September 6, 2020 by Mayner

[patrick]

Here are a couple of Dapol Esso tank wagons which were the first rolling stock I built about 8 years ago to run with the MM baby GM's before the current layout was started. They were unmodified since at the time I had very little information about the prototypes. They were painted using brown auto body primer for the underframe and grey primer for the tanks. Some day I might get around to extend the tanks however due to the affordability of the kits starting from scratch is probably a better option.

[Sean]

Hey guys so its been a long time since i updated this thread,a lot of the building stuff has fallen by the way side and with such a healthy array of OO rtr stock on the way i do not know if i will be making anything new in OO for a while.

that being said I am a few weeks into a new n gauge layout build which was initially intended to be continental. however after seeing the potential of what can be done with Irish n gauge the focus has shifted into building an irish layout with a few suitable items of rolling stock to go along with it.

 so far I have kept things mostly simple. however i do have shapeways stuff and some farish mk3's to refinish with vinyl on the way which will be interesting.

 

first on the chopping block is the farish 08. as the body of these are die cast, not a while lot can be done except for a respray and the correct decals applied.

I have had this as part of a set for a good few years now but it has not seen regular use until lately and it is a little cracker of a unit. happy to plod along at a walking pace.

 

 

from this same set, the brake van, in need of a suitable respray and a few details changing to make it feel more irish.

I do have a soft spot for box vans, and when i seen that peco offer these rtr for around the same price as  a dapol OO kit, I had to grab like 7 These come complete with slightly shorter looking couplings which peco say space the vans out properly to scale.  they do look really nice in a train.

 

the roofs pop off for easily repainting in grey. however as can be seen here. I have not been able to remove the white LMS lettering without taking off the greay paint so i reckon i will need to simply paint over it, these should look great when i get my hands on suitable transfers.

 

Finally for the moment until the mk3's arrive and I am able to fund shapeways theres this kato 103 emu which im planning to refinish into a 2 car dart set, not entirely sure what era I will be aiming for with this as I have just been having too much damn fun playing with it, at about 60 quid this is a damn good little runner that can again easily move at a snails pace. I am definitely planning on adding at least another one to the collection when i get to building a larger N layout. its got metal wheels all round and makes a seriously impressive little click clack when its going around the layout.

 

Also Theres this, not a train but definitely fits in the spirit of this thread and at 10 euro's from oxford I really am impressed with the level of detail which surpassed expectations on it.

It even has a little Irish Reg plate which i assume is based on the real bus, cant really see it to well in this photo however.

[Galteemore]

Excellent stuff. Kato make good units at a fair price - I had a fair amount of Japanese N at one stage and loved the quality. 

[Noel]

I've been fortunate over the years to convert some old hornby/lima/Airfix(Dapol) stock as well as kit bashing and some affordable resin kits from Provincial wagons, MIR and IFM

Bachmann RTR vans given the CIE treatment, passed the 'duck test' for me   and I run these wagons more than any other piece of rolling stock

Hornby Rail road Stonier coach to CIE Laminate

3D beet wagons on dapol chassis

3D body shell kits to CIE loco bodies

C-Rail containers on IFM 20ft skeletal body kit

Triang Hornby GWR toad to exGSWR plough conversion

Hornby mk3 to IR intercity

Lima BR mk1 BSK to CIE GSV

LIma GUV to CIE bogie brake parcels van

MIR cement pallet wagon kits

Dapol unpainted wagons to CIE

Provincial wagons single beet kit along side Dapol to CIE 5 plank general open wagon

Provincial wagons bullied open wagon (beet) kit (essential for any Irish Layout)

Provincial Wagons double beet wagon kit (a must for any Irish Layout)

Converted Hornby GWR brake van

 

My first ever Irish piece of rolling stock. Hand painted nearly 5 decades ago from a Triang-Hornby LMS maroon coach. If only my hands were as steady today as they were then. I was obsessed with having an Irish looking train, so out came the humbrol paints, a bit of mixing, trial and error, and brush painted this, which still has a prized siding on the layout. Childhood memories and nostalgia.

[Noel]

Well done Sean. That's very resourceful making up Irish stock for N gauge.

[JasonB]

On 5/3/2021 at 1:15 AM, Sean said:

Hey guys so its been a long time since i updated this thread,a lot of the building stuff has fallen by the way side and with such a healthy array of OO rtr stock on the way i do not know if i will be making anything new in OO for a while.

that being said I am a few weeks into a new n gauge layout build which was initially intended to be continental. however after seeing the potential of what can be done with Irish n gauge the focus has shifted into building an irish layout with a few suitable items of rolling stock to go along with it.

 so far I have kept things mostly simple. however i do have shapeways stuff and some farish mk3's to refinish with vinyl on the way which will be interesting.

Good stuff Sean. Your updates always contain something of interest. 

Edited July 13, 2023 by JasonB