Garden Railway Forum

I just finished the latest coach for the CLR and gave it an outing today in the winter sunshine.

It's a scratch-built freelance design, based loosely on the Ffestiniog Bug Box. Body and chassis from 2mm MDF, with 2mm artists' board framing and thin ply roof. Window frames are 1mm card with food packaging glazing. Other fittings from the "bits n bobs" box.

Here's a snap of the coach behind my HGLW Rapier.

Very creative from your basic raw materials... useful addition to the stock.

Very nice! Looks very effective.

Peter in Va

That's a really nice coach build.

Lovely! I applaud your (re)use of 'found' materials - particularly as you have produced an impressive looking model.

Rik

Very nice build that. It looks just the ticket behind the loco.

Smashing little coach, looks just right. Well done on turning out such a lovely model

Looks the part.

Great looking little coach build. A few of these will make a lovely train.
D.

Thats a great build, some lovely detailing on it. How long did it take to build please, and what chassis did you use.

Thanks for the nice comments, folks.

David - yes, a rake would look good but I may not live long enough to build them!!

Rod - Hmmm, a good question. I tend to build stuff in parallel as its better to do all the cutting for example at the same time. That said, the coach was built over a period of around 5 weeks, doing it as time and good light permitted. The basic body went together in under an hour, but framing and windows took about 3 hours a side each. Painting and detailing are also not quick. Scratch building is fun and cheap, but very time consuming. My kit built Bug Box went together very quickly, but was significantly more expensive.
The chassis is a basic trough of MDF with brass tubing cross-ways for the Cambrian wheels to run in. This sub-assembly sits in a well in the underside of the body.

I think it is time well spent, and you have given me the inspiration to have a go myself when I get my other jobs done, they are mounting up.

Nice build and agree about how long it takes to build from scratch. My memory is so poor if I do a repeat build at another time I can never remember how I did it the first time