Mu'N'dane 08 (N part 18)…

I didn't have the money for one of Graham Farish's new release 08s, and the model seems to still command high prices second hand on eBay. Not a surprise, considering the characterful locomotive is at home on many layouts...

So a chance find of a Farish 08 chassis I had acquired for an 009 project, along with seeing Rails had some NSE 'IVOR' bodies going for £12 and a plan was hatched to repaint one in BR blue for Paxton Road 2. First though, I needed to find a new identity and wanted to reference Chester and my childhood finding a locomotive that had served as station pilot. Well a good dig through the BR Database found a few options, but of course, the curse of the 08 door/cab window/foot board boxes! Trying to find one that matched the Farish un-hinged bonnet doors with wooden cab door tooling was tricky, and eventually I settled on quite a long lived example, 08665, which had two spells at Chester on record.

By 1983 it had black buffer beams, had lost the upper marker light and lamp irons on the cab back, yet matched the wooden door and cupboard arrangement. Layer in life, it gained an extra cupboard, but who knows when - and although it was a reasonable match to the Farish model, the latter had a wooden framed cab window - I'll touch the frame in with a dark brown before re-fitting the glazing to disguise this slightly.

The model was carefully prepared - rather than strip all the paint I decided it would be better to just scrape away the red paint, and apply a very thin coat of grey primer before using Precision 'faded rail blue' as I did on my Bachmann OO gauge example. A set of Fox decals finished it off, along with some off white paint (Matt 28) for the handrails. I've removed the front step handrails as these are pretty awful, and may replace in time with something finer and more prototypical. I also need to sort couplings and once that is done I'll add some rudimentary detail under the front and rear. To look at the model in the flesh, it looks superb, but when you zoom in you begin to notice the shortcomings of the tooling and the face I didn't strip the paint, but for a cheap and each conversion for my own small N scale project, its perfect.

I'm sure you'll see a bit more on this one, once I've finished the weathering, added the cab glazing and fitted some couplings. Until then, more soon...

NOTE: No Friday update this week, as I've had a week away from the workbench on holiday, back today but not in time to put anything resembling a normal update together. Back to 'normal' (well school holidays normal) next week.