Hudson Hunslet in 7/8ths: Primed and poised...

The Hudson Hunslet is a prototype of a batch of large scale 7/8ths (1:13.7) models I'm producing this summer, and my own locomotive is now fully assembled and primed, awaiting the completion of the wiring and further painting...

It's a multi-media product, with scratch built styrene, laser cut styrene and acrylic and 3D printed acrylic and nylon parts combined with Slaters wheels, a small gear head drive and Delrin chain and sprockets, powered by 4 AAA rechargeable batteries and controlled by a Deltang based R/C system from Micron Radio Control.

Now in primer all the multitude of parts tie together beautifully and all the love, care and attention to detail has paid off, with the locomotive coming to life, and at least to my eye, capturing the character of the prototype beautifully. My own model will be open cabbed, so you can see the controls in the cab that I've painstakingly copied from drawings and prototype visits, but some of the production run will feature cabs. This one will end up bright (Humbrol 131) green with black and red parts picked out, and I can't wait to make a start on this once the etched brass radiator fan turns up from a custom order through Narrow Planet.

The chassis is now proven and will allow me to produce many other small diesels in the scale in the coming months and years, I've a few exciting commissions already for 2019 and 2020 in 7/8ths, a scale I very much feel is a 'modellers' scale.

For now, the crisp early morning sun has captured the prototype in grey and I hope you'll be as excited as I am when I begin to add some colour. More soon...