A progress update for the LNWR M7 Railmotor.

Roof held in place with binding wire

Now that I was happy with the shape of the roof for the railmotor it was trimmed to length and soldered on, This required a little care trying to keep the sides straight and in line with the roof as there was nothing to locate them. I think if I was doing it again I would solder a thin strip inside the roof so that it would provide a ledge for the sides to rest up on. I used a little soft iron binding wire to hold the roof in place whilst I soldered it all up. Once soldered up it did strengthen the body up considerably.

Roof in place with guttering

A length of copper wire was soldered on to the edge to represent the guttering.

Making the chimney.

The next part was the exhaust vent/chimney. On the rail motor there are a couple of “chimneys”, one is for the exhaust and one I presume for the safety valve.

From the photos it appears that the exhaust chimney is circular but the second one is longer. I’m reluctant to call it oval as the sides are quite flat, so a bit of round brass tube squeezed in a pair of pliers seems to have done the trick with the getting the shape looking something right. As the drive unit pivots there must be movement between the chimney and roof so there is a rain shield to fit. This was cut from a sheet of 5 thou nickel-silver sheet and soldered to the chimneys.

Railmotor bogie with pickups

At the non-driving end I used a set of etchings from the 2mmFS Association to make up the bogie. This was a straightforward build as supplied. However with the driving bogies being a rigid 4-wheel unit I felt that it would benefit from trying to fit extra pickups to the bogie. The first attempt was just a bit of phosphor-bronze wire pressing on the wheels but this stopped the wheels moving completely!! So I then tried putting a coil in the wire but that caught on the chassis so this is version 3. However it’s not the final version – the wire is fine for 7mm pickups but too thick for 2mm so it will be replaced with some finer wire in a similar arrangement.

Railmotor chassis detailing

I then moved onto a bit more chassis details. The wire bracing is a bit of 0.5mm nickel-silver wire with a couple of 7mm handrail knobs for the vertical braces. I filed off the base on the handrail knob and once soldered on I filed flats on the end to get rid of the ball end and make it look more like a cylindrical sleeve. The boxes were just filed up from a bit of brass bar stock and buffers were fitted.

LNWR Railmotor

So it’s managed to fill in some of the vacant space in the chassis area and made it look a little less empty underneath.

LNWR Railmotor

 

LNWR Railmotor

 

Railmotor at St. Ruth

Then at the beginning of December I had the honour of helping to operate St. Ruth at the Manchester Model Railway Exhibition. It seems to be something of a 2mmFS tradition to have a “run what you brung” session in the closing hours of an exhibition. So for it’s first public outing the Railmotor replaced the Pannier tanks and auto coach on the branch line shuttle. I was too busy enjoying myself behind the controls so my thanks to Ian Smith for grabbing a couple of photos.

Railmotor at St. Ruth