The Restoration Chronicles - Brute force and ignorance

Well, it's been a while... The combination of stupidly long hours at work and a couple of scheduled holidays mean that it's been far too long since I did any modelling. After a couple of days riding motorbikes around Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire, I now ache too much to do anything more than a bit of gentle modelling.

The brute force is the way that I finally decided to restore the wagon sides to near-straightness. I have decided that if I try and use heat or more solvents, then I just risk making things worse. So I have slid a knife blade down to separate the sides from the lead flashing that is inside the wagin and provides some weight. After this, I've gently eased the sides out with my fingers, and it seems to have worked. What I will do is put a couple of slivers of plastic card down into the newly created gaps to pack them out, and add a plastic cross-brace across the middle as well. Hopefully this will be sufficient to maintain things in a linear fashion.

And the ignorance? Well, I'm still ignorant about exactly what diagram of LNWR wagon this represents. More fundamentally, when on earth was a Permanent Way Department wagon doing on a Great Eastern branchline in the Herts/Essex borders?

So with that as a thought, and in order to avoid the side-warping effects of Daywat Poly on normal plastic mouldings, I've decided that I'm not going to try and replace the C&L chairs that were previously the load. There are a couple still firmly glued to the floor, but the rest have been levered off the lead flashing and thrown away.

There will be a couple of LNWR wagon sheets used to cover the weights, and the reason why it is traversing Essex? Well, it had a hot box and had to be diverted to the nearest repair shop, which happened to be on the GER. Simple!