The eagle-eyed will have noticed there was something odd about the look of the newly-finished L1 in my last post.

Specifically, the curved handrail above the smokebox door, a distinctive feature of Robinson designs, was missing.

There's a reason why that has been the case on all of my models to date- I have never been able to get a curved rail I'm happy with. Either the curve I get is wrong, or the material breaks, or it just stubbornly refuses to bend. Usually leaving them off doesn't detract too much from the appearance of the finished model- my D10, both J11s, N5 and C5 attest to that- but somehow this time the omission was glaringly obvious. Something had to be done.

What I did was to take a length of 0.5mm plastic rod and wrap it around a piece of 20mm brass pipe I had in my spares box. I then held it over a candle flame for a few seconds to soften the plastic and coerce it to take up the curve. If you hold the plastic too loose, it will part. Likewise if you hold it too tight it will part. The skill seems to lie in judging how tightly to hold the plastic to the brass, and how long you hold it near the candle flame, and how close you hold it to the flame.

After about the third attempt I dropped lucky and managed to get a curve which, although it isn't perfect, is 'good enough' for me.

The next step is to thread on a handrail knob and then using tweezers and pliers put in the 90-degree bends. It helps if the strip of plastic used is longer than the intended handrail!

I was then able to glue the handrail onto the model- the handrail knob into the smokebox and the rail itself glued on a butt joint to the straight rails I'd applied earlier in the build.

It's a small change but it really makes all the difference:

When I get around to it and have the spare material I'll no doubt put my other GC locos through the same procedure.