Last year with the proceeds of a sale I bought a couple of Kirk LNER non corridor 51′ parcels vans at Keighley show.

Last weekend, in between the rain/snow/hail.sunshine etc. I made a start on one of them. Now I haven’t done a Kirk kit before so it was a bit of a learning curve especially cleaning up all the individual pieces. The sides went together okay and I can see how I might improve things slightly on the second one.

Although I plan to replace the bogies and turnbuckles (on the first one, the second I intend to do as a later angle truss variant) I decided to see what I could do to improve the underframe parts that came with it before discarding them out of hand.

The battery boxes are supplied plain panelled fronted with optional plank doors if modelling pre 1930’s LNER (according to Ian’s instructional notes). For the first one I decided to add the planked doors to a plasticard backer and stick it to the rear to allow me to fill the box with some lead shot. The lead was added loose and the lid glued on with some small vent holes drilled in the base to allow any solvent fumes to escape. I added some pieces of angle to the bottoms to represent the cradle that the LNER Batteries sat in. I just need to finish them with the addition of the supporting straps and nuts that go down each end.

The vacuum cylinders I did consign to the bin – no matter what I did with them I couldn’t improve them so I raided the Parkside spares box and came up with a couple that looked so much better. To these I added the V hangers supplied and stuck them all to a 20 thou plasticard base plate.

Lastly I assembled the supplied dynamo and made up a mounting bracket and a block for the electrical cables which I still have to add.

I am still struggling to get decent photos of anything with white plasticard in the picture.