Building an A1 'Albert'

Back in July John Flower from A1 Models handed me his latest etched O9 kit, based on the locomotive 'Albert' of the Littlehampton Miniature Railway. Although now 12 1/4" gauge this locomotive was originally 15" gauge, built at Windmill Farm in Lancashire, started by Craig Gluyas and completed by Dave Madden and Austin Moss. The kit certainly captures the style of the loco if not all the details and fits on the Kato 11-103 or 11-109 chassis.

This is the etches as supplied, John had only etched four doors instead of six on the main etch so two extra were supplied! An etched chassis frame is supplied, I think this is from an existing 009 Kit. The purpose of the four rectangular pieces top right was a bit of a mystery at first (I had no instructions), but I eventually fixed them to the chassis to locate the bonnet and cab units.

Having folded up the bonnet and cab parts I opted to remove some of the tabs intended to make assembly easier - although well intended and perhaps helpful to anyone using an adhesive for these joints, they made the fit of the bonnet front awkward and the cab roof did not sit correctly at the eaves. The bonnet front was soldered in place inside the sides/top and the cab joined in the corner, having added a length of scrap etch to pack out the join to keep the dimensions of front and sides equal. The cab roof was soldered in place, aligning it correctly took some time due to the etched ridges underneath just being in the wrong place!

The etched grille on the front had distorted in the heat of the soldering iron, but that was a minor issue really. At this point I took the photo above and shortly afterwards spotted my "deliberate" mistake... I had soldered the whole front panel in upside down!

This was promptly rectified before moving on to the next stage, adding the bonnet side grilles/doors and cab doors. These were fixed in place using a thin coating of Araldite in two sessions, one for each side, in order to avoid disrupting one side whilst working on the other.

I have temporarily added the other grille mesh in front of the chequered mesh, temporary as I have identified this as an area that I may wish to upgrade, not least as it seems to float in the space, and also because the real locomotive has a different style of front grille altogether.

I had to do a bit of cleaning up around the cab doors to remove excess Araldite, there is only about 1mm either side to fix to so a bit of spread under the edges was inevitable. I moved the door up as far as I dared so there wasn't a huge gap above it, overlapping by about 2mm at the top and less than 0.5mm at the bottom. The kit can be built with one or both of the doors propped open at 180 degrees and some cab interior detail, it would seem the real loco often runs in that fashion at Littlehampton.

As well as the grille upgrade I plan to add a shallow curved top to the bonnet using 20 thou styrene and some supporting strips. It cannot curve too much due to the cab front windows but should give a better impression of the prototype it is based on. I will also be adding bufferbeams and a few underframe details to finish the model off.

The kit can be purchased on A1 Models on eBay.

More soon...

Colin