The rebuilding of the Princess has reached the stage of needing to test the chassis before fitting the body. I don’t have a layout but I do have a test board with various diameter curves on it. Unfortunately said board lives in the shed and when needed is temporarily erected in the cloakroom. Over the last couple of days the weather here has been really windy making bring the board in undamaged quite a precarious proposition so in the bits of time that I had in between looking after Chris and doing the various household chores I decided do pick up the Just Like The Real Thing Stanier tender. This came with my JLRT Royal Scot but needing a welded tender for the 8F now that it’s changed to 8425 and having found the spare teched sides and rear panel for the MOK version I am now building the JLRT tender bt fitting it with the MOK welded spares and then I will swap the tenders and use the MOK tender for the Royal Scot and the JLRT tender for the 8F.

I bought the kit second hand and the gent that I bought it from hadn’t taken into account the sheer weight of the JLRT cast boiler when packing it. As a result it had shifted somewhat in transport and it had pretty much crushed the inner cage for the tender by the time it arrived with me. Much careful straightening has got the cage back into shape and soldered together and a good start has been made on the inner frames.