Article of the Month

Compromising Coaches II - your very own SK

So you've considered the advice from last month and weighed up the pros and cons, where do we go from here in the art of compromise. I can boldly say that an FK and an SK variant can be built from the CK (or two) without too much heartache - this month, I've chosen the more difficult of the two !

To produce the SK/TSO variant from CK's to the Compromised theory, you will need at least one CK and another window unit from somewhere (the Restaurant car has 6 sets !). The bad news is that the coach has to be really segmented to achieve the desired result - 8 segmented cuts in all, and some trimming to size. Another alternative is to wait until next month when I have produced the FK and use the left-over bits along with a bit of Restaurant car for this one. (note that producing a correctly sized SK requires 2 CK's and leaves behind the bits that we can use here - find a friend that is building correct length and work together!)

Take your CK, with the number to the right-hand end and examine closely. You will have :

Door - Toilet - 3 2nd compartments - Door - 4 1st compartments - Toilet - Door

The final effort will be as follows:

Door - 4 2nd comprtments - Door - 4 2nd compartments - Door - Toilet

On SK's and TSO's (they look the same on the outside - and someday please tell me if I'm wrong on this one !), the toilets are at one end only and are opposite each other whereas the CK has one at each end on one side only. My first cuts would remove the two ends, and the second two cuts would remove a door and toilet off of each end. The two toilet sections are now cut straight down the centreline of the coach, and the two toilet-door combinations joined together to form the Door-Toilet end of our coach (stick an end on this bit.). I usually place all of the segments together on the roof-moulding and glue all of these to the roof once the dimensions are all correct, followed by cutting out the floor, and fitting onto a baseplate carrying the bogies, boxes and with seating on top - your choice how you do it !

You are left with a piece of coach containing 3 2nd's, a door and 4 1st's - cut between the door and the 4 1st's - the resulting Door-3 2nd's segment can produce the opposite end of the coach, and the extra window from your Restaurant (or wherever) can be stuck on here - note that the window-window width is 4mm, so shave the extra window to match this dimension.

We now have a two-ended coach with a missing centre section - here it gets tricky. The remaining 4 1st compartments have to be cut into 4 seperate compartments and all reduced in window-window width to 4mm but my estimates suggest that this will yield a coach of overall end-to-end of only 165mm compared to 169mm for the normal Triang vehicle so carefully shave your compartments to size to fit the gap in the middle ! Note that if you are using some of the 2nd class compartments from another butchered CK, drop the correct parts into position and cut down another Restaurant car window to correct size.

All that's needed now is a coat of paint, and we're ready for mainline service.

I have checked with a number of people and the general concensus is that there were not that many FK's floating around compared to SK's, CK's and TSO's so theoretically you would have quite a few SK's and TSO's compared to the number of FK's. The other interesting fact is that the SK-style window arrangement matches the normal arrangement of TS vehicles in a lot of EMU's including the 309 Clacton's and the SR 4CEP's, with a bit more modification to get to the driving car design - but this is truly possible.

My intention is to add these Plan Pages to the website once a suitable diagram - with seperate sets of instructions for Compromise and correct sized coaches - and also that explains in better detail the full building and alterations rather than my ramblings !

Time to get out the razor-saw !!

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November 1998