This is a scratchbuilt 3mm scale model of a 'Churchward County' in later condition, with standard 'big' 3,500 gallon tender. The loco is destined for Howard Love's layout in France, where it will assume the personna of 'County of Bedford'. Not the easiest of subjects in any scale, in 3mm/12mm gauge these engines are PIGS. 'Bedford' has a 1024 Mashima motor driving a High Level 'Minimiser' 54:1 gearbox and Sharman 'millimetre series' wheels. The buffers, chimney and tender axleboxes are castings from 3mm Scale Model Railways, but everything else is scratchbuilt.
Getting the loco correctly weighted was tricky - it's 3-point compensated on 'Flexi-chas' principles with a loaded tender bearing on the rear. There is weight in the front of the boiler, under the cab floor and in the tender. At least it now sits on the track without doing a nose-down, but we have yet to see what it will pull and how reliable the pick-up is. Currently, it's in the paintshop.
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Here is "Small Metro" No. 1495 built to P4 standards. This is the first loco to be completed for my pet P4 GW project, a model of Chagford's erstwhile station as it really might have been if the proposals of the 1883 Exeter, Teign Valley and Chagford Railway Act had come to fruition. Suitable motive power includes a 'Small Metro' like this - with examples shedded at Exeter and Newton Abbot and used on the nearby Moretonhampstead branch before the Kaiser's war. The model is of 1893-built GWR No.1495 as running c.1907 with A0 Dean boiler and original flush-riveted tanks with rear-mounted fillers - to my eyes, these engines at their most comely.
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