Iconic Carriages Part Four

Currently spending a few days in Wales enjoying a last course of Antique Kettle Therapy of the year. We’ve been blessed with crisp autumnal weather, just a shame that it’s likely to be daffodil season or later before I get another dose. 

Have taken this opportunity to spend an evening drinking tea and catching up with my friend Chris, a Tywyn resident. I’d brought the two Corris carriages with me, plus some motive power and we spent a happy session test running the carriages on Chris’s ‘Hensbarrow’ layout. They ran a treat, the previous derailments being a thing of the past and were down to poor assembly of one bogie by me. 

Whilst in Wales, I’ve shown them to another friend Paul and we discussed means of reducing the height on them to closer to original Corris height and came up with some ideas. 

The floor is a resin casting which is the thickness of the solebars. Replacing this with styrene would gain a few mm’s depth. The bogie centre boss could be thinned slightly and if need be the top of the bogie side frames trimmed to reduce the height further, but not by much. 

The bogie side frames have some very pronounced axle box detail on them which would be invisible if lowered. Removing this to a minimum should give some movement for the bogies. 

I shall be leaving these modifications to others, but will be interested to see how they progress as for my needs, the height is just fine. 

One thing that this evening did cement is the need for me to build a layout of my own to run my model trains on.