An 006.5 brake for the EHLR...

Although I built a Hunslet Waril for 009 a number of years ago I never got around to building it's matching SHLR brake van...

Now in 006.5 I realised I could do with something to use with my 'Heywood' Hunslet, and the SHLR (Sand Hutton Light Railway) brake, build by Hudson in the 1920s, might fit the bill...

I scaled the drawings in the excellent RCL publications 'Sand Hutton Light Railway' book down to 4mm scale and realised just how big a true scale model would be - well long, not necessarily wide, this is 18" gauge after all...

The model is about 16mm wide (pretty close to the SHLR, a touch narrower) the body sides are 20mm tall (as per the SHLR) and the length... well that's the compromise. To get it to work on my proposed Busch track based micro layout I couldn't think that a true scale length model would actually be able to be used... the model, as it stands, is just under 40mm buffer to buffer.

The chassis is a Busch one, cut in half, and extended with styrene I Beam section extrusions. The body is all scratch built in plastic, the planked sides coming from an old Slater sheet I had lying around. It shows how tiny some of these prototypes are, but when compared to the Hunslet (below) it's about the right height - or at least close to the prototype.

What next? Well I need to paint the wagons and van - I'm thinking grey bodies wagons and a nice olive green bodied brake van, all on dark brown or black chassis...

To close here are a few of the van with the inspiration and the preliminary sketches before I made a start on reading your key dimensions!

More soon! I can't wait to get it finished and lettered up...