There is one slight problem with my latest loco builds. Most of them have been goods engines... which is fine, I have the rolling stock to go with them, except for one crucial example.

A decent brakevan....

I've got three ready to run- two GWR Toads (one Dapol, one Bachmann)- but they don't count on account of being GWR- and an LNER 'D' (at least, I think it's a D....) from Bachmann. Thing is, of those three, two are completely the wrong geographically speaking, and the other I suspect may be a little too late for 1927-29. What I need, really, is something that 1) would have been seen around Marylebone and 2) would have been there in the mid-late 1920s. in short, what I need is a GC-pattern brakevan to go with my GC-pattern goods locos.

The germ of the idea took my imagination a little before Christmas when I saw a Hornby DCC starter set with a large-ish LMS brakevan and a 6-wheel tank wagon. Hello, I thinks, if I take the chassis of the one and the body of the other and....

Long story short I bought a second hand LMS brakevan and milk tanker, and naively steamed in thinking it would be a simple job to switch the bodies and chassis' over. This is Hornby, right- who grew out of Meccano, whose whole point was interchangability of parts...

Good joke!

What I actually found was that the milk tanker was held together by a long, thin screw, and the brakevan by a short, fat one. Also that the brakevan holding screw was offset by about 4mm off-centre. This needs a bit of mulling over I thought, and then I put them both away. Fast forward six months and I find myself 'not really in a mood' to press on with the B5 at the moment, and wanting something 'quick and easy' to do thoughts gravitated toward the two wagons, which by now had fallen off their shelf and to the back of the wardrobe. You may gather i might have forgotten about the issue with the screws and placement of screwholes....

The first thing to do was to measure up the drawing of a GC brakevan I have, in the back of volume III of George Dow's 'The Great Central Railway'. Turns out that the LMS van is, overall, 6mm too long. 4mm of this length is in the guard's compartment. A-ha, thinks I, we'll cut 4mm out of the guard's compartment BUT we'll offset it, which will pull the screw fixing in closer to the centre of the van and avoid surgey either on wither of the screwholes. Cutting out 4mm of length actually brought the overall length down to very close to scale- it is only about 0.5mm too long now- because of the width of the sawcuts.

Then I began looking at the end vestibules. These are the correct length but the thing is they are 'the wrong way around'. On the LMS van the access doorways are at the extreme ends, with a low side panel to the guard's compartment. On the GC van, it's the other way around. So I had to cut away the low side panels too.

Luckily I think this is the last of the heavy surgery involved- the van has been cut up, had parts cut or filed away, and is now sitting on the table with a couple of hefty sheets of plastic glued to the inside of the centre cut. The next step will be to put milliput down the gap and then file it all down to remove all of the moulded detail. Then I can make new body sides with thin plastic sheet.