Eyes Wide Open

The birth of baby Amelia on Sunday 25th March has created a new regime in the Peake household, and seeing her with eyes wide open made me open my own...

I had started to wonder some time ago whether my more recent O9 industrial models, such as the Drewery-bash loco and some open wagons on Black Dog Mining chassis, were a journey in the wrong direction.  Although that project including a replacement flat wagon (on Hudson chassis) for the 'Shifting Sands' fleet, that didn't work out as planned, and I was perhaps a bit too hasty in whipping chassis away from the 'Shifting Sands' works fleet.  What was required were new miniature railway style wagons.

At Narrow Gauge North I had picked up an old example of the Black Dog Mining WA01 chassis frame to fit over a Peco 10ft wheelbase wagon chassis.  With the odd half hour to spare each day during my first week of  paternity leave I used this as a basis to create a body based on the ex-Sutton Miniature Railway 'Loco Coal' wagon that lives in the Griffin Hall museum at Cleethorpes.

(L) Sutton style 'Loco Coal' wagon (R) Cleethorpes style general-purpose wagon

This is a fairly faithful recreation of the original, down to a set of N-Brass buffers on the headstocks!

The other wagon illustrated is a revival of the 'Shifting Sands' wagon that used to carry two oil drums.  Shorn of it's newer industrial drop-side body this has received a new, simpler body based upon two of the Cleethorpes works fleet.  The eagle eyed will see that the body is slightly short of the chassis length - this is deliberate in order to make it look different from the normal Black Dog products.

These little projects have kept me occupied at a time when starting something new is all to daunting, I must get around to painting them!