Last night saw the shunting truck compete or so I thought. A chance look through one of the RCTS Green Books revealed that some locos had shunting poles on brackets along the valances. This got my mind working and I reasoned that if the tender truck had foot boards and handrails for the shunter why not a shunting pole too.

A quick Google search this morning got me an idea of what they look like and the approximate sizes, so I set to this afternoon to see if I could make one.

The hand rails look a bit worse for handling (if you will pardon the pun!) but given that the loco that I plan to run this behind is in post war LNER livery I would expect these wagons to be a little tired by then.

The pole is made from a cut down cocktail stick, which I turned in my dremel wile applying a sanding stock.

I cut the point off and drilled a hole approx 10mm down the centre. I then got the end of a brass pin that I had used the head as a rivet (I have a little pot on my workbench with all sorts of offcuts etc. just for such occasions. I annealed the end of it and twisted it with round nosed pliers to the rough approximation of what I had seen in photos.

I then had a look in the scrap etc. box an found a piece of nickel that had been half etched so was quite thin. I cut a strip off this and shaped it to make the ferrule for the end of the pole and soldered it together.

I then glued the pin in the hole and mixed up a watery mix of black\gunmetal\steel acrylics and washed over the handle to give a used look. A quick dunk in metal black sorted the hook and ferrule.

As a slight aside I have found it very difficult to remove the excess solder on this build – or at least the staining of where it’s been.