Article of the Month

The Building of the Bone

'I would like a nice class 58 for all these HAA wagons I'm building' said Bruce, and the project was on.

It feels like it was only yesterday, that Bruce Smetham confronted me with designs on a class 58 diesel, known lovingly by the railway enthusiasts as 'bones' due to having full width cabs at each end, and a narrower engine compartment . At the time, I was carving into Triang suburban coaches and building a 2EPB from the remnants and this is still going on (I'm great at theory, but reality can take a little while longer - like most fellow modellers!). With the introduction of the HAA coal wagons, there had to be the motive power to pull them and Bruce felt that Broad Green warranted super-power, so I was commissioned to build a few.

From the very beginning, the build of these unusual machines was fraught with problems - the obvious one being where to house the motor for such a slim bodyshell. Eventually, I conncocted a box design based on a baseplate, with the roof, sides and cabs being joined to this basic start-up structure, and 8 boxes were built so that a batch could be built as this would be easier than building just one or two.

Another encountered problem was the way that measurements that were all fairly close with less than a millimetre variance would cause so much grief when built into box form - so now only 4 boxes were any good to use. The first two units were advancing in the erecting shop and had gained sectional roofs and sides (the mk II version will have an all-in-one roof ) and an aluminium template was designed to cut out cabs from a piece of clear acetate. Although this seemed initially the way to go, the cab assemblies when folded and glued did not stick too well and some heavy duty adhesion was put to work inside the cabs of 001 to ensure that the cabs did not part company too soon (002 has the same cabs, and suffered a complete de-cab when it was dropped on to the floor recently!), and the cab design is also coming under scrutiny for the mk II version. It is likely that 005 to 008 will be replaced by mk II versions with an integral chassis, with 003 and 004 being kept for departmental stock (I'll probably number them as 58600 and 58601 in my odd numbering system, and paint them in LSE Jaffa-Cake livery - sorry!).

After what seemed like an eternity (although probably about a year to a year and a half), 001 took shape and turned out of the works as a grey-painted bodyshell with no detail. This was promptly despatched to Bruce, who is still trying to figure out how to squeeze a drive unit under it, and I would ascertain from general reports in dispatches and a number of articles that the drive system is well on it's way!!

Special message for Bruce - 002 is nearly there (and yes, I did say that in January!!)

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August 1998