There are a couple of my shelf queens that are especially dear to Chris’s heart, since they were gifts from her. This is one of them finished at last – an MMP LMS Glass wagon.

This is one of those that I started a couple of years too early in the confidence and experience stakes. When I started on it I made mistakes but didn’t have the confidence to unsolder it and start again. What seemed a struggle at the time was so much easier when I picked it up again. To be honest using some of the MMP bits on other build has helped me understand the way that they go together which has helped tremendously.

As a kit it is very highly detailed and the only bit’s that I changed were the rope rings that I remade from brass wire (they were very nice whitemetal castings) and the screw clamps that hold the packing cases. Once again the ones supplied were castings but I wanted them to work. It turned out quite easy to do the make up of the slide that holds the clamp was easy to tap 10ba and the clamps themselves I made from a 10ba brass screw with two sections of tube soldered over them at the head end (I only had countersunk screws so I had to mount them in my mini drill and turn the heads down so that the large tube would fit. This was then filled with solder.

There were some etched handles supplied but I wanted something a bit more robust so cut a slot in the end of the screw and soldered in a brass pin.

A shot of the clamps – I need to patch in the paint where I moved them to clamp the crates.

I didn’t take any photo’s of the end of the journey on this one but here it is in it’s grey livery just needing the black bits doing and then some transfers and weathering.

I also replaced the buffer heads with some brass ones that I had in the spares box this made it a bit easier to spring them.

The wood for the deck and packing cases was supplied with the kit along with cutting templates.