With the detailing of the front plate for the tender complete, attention turned toward getting it to move. Unlike the kit I had for 'Sir Clement Royds' the tender of this example came with a moulded-in chassis of sorts, but there was a problem. Firstly the moulding was so thick as to make it the devil's own job to fit axles, and secondly once the axles had been forced into place the tender sat too low.

Looking at Sir Clement Royds to see how to overcome this problem I saw that the original builder of that model had used the tender chassis of a Triang 2P, so I decided to do the same. Luckily I had one in my spares box so out it came. Releasing the tender chassis was simplicity itself, but when it came to removing the moulded chassis of the tender it put up a fight... an hour of frustration and pain later, and having had to resort to the use of some Anglo-Saxon, I finally had a tender body that would fit on the Triang chassis. I was then able to build up a new rear bufferbeam, fit the buffers and handrails and fill in the small gap left between the chassis and the bottom of the tender tank.

I then turned my machinations to the loco body. I've previously mentioned how the Directors had lost their side skirts by the mid-1920s, and how this kit as supplied builds a Director in, roughly, their 1913- 25 condition. I therefore had to remove the skirts.

Whilst performing surgery on the tender I had found that an easy way to reliably break the resin in 'more or less' the place you want to break it, you make a series of cuts and then use pliers to break away the material between them. I found on the loco body that this method works perfectly well- it was the work of maybe five minutes to remove the majority of the material necessary and then all that was left was to clean up and form the fore-and-aft curves with a selection of fine files.

Putting the whole ensemble together I'm pleased by how quickly the thing starts to look like a locomotive- the only major work left to do is to fit up the front bufferbeam, add the reversing lever and the loco handrails. Realistically these are pretty small jobs and so it could be in the paintshops by the middle of the week...