A couple of small projects here which reflect my liking for maintaining and/or improving older models, rather than throwing them away just because there's a newer, shinier version.

I have a couple of the Accurascale Siphons, and they're wonderful models, but (to my eye) so were my Lima ones when they first appeared. There wasn't much in the way of non-passenger carrying stock available RTR back in the late 70s, so these models immediately added a bit of variety to my passenger trains, and I was very fond of them.

The main problem with them, if you can call it that, is that they've got BR bogies but should be on GWR ones. Quite a while ago, I managed to get two pairs of Coachmaster white metal bogies of the correct type, and I converted one of my Siphons in short order. The other, in the bogus Palethorpes livery, took a bit longer. Since I already had a plain brown one, I intended to do a full detailing and repainting job on this second one, because obviously, one couldn't live with the fictitious Palethorpes branding. In the meantime, the Accurascale ones arrived and I acquired a crimson and a BR blue example, somewhat negating the need for another BR one. Nonetheless I pushed on and fitted the second set of bogies, and was admiring the vehicle in that condition when it struck me that I rather liked the Palethorpes livery! I had liked it at the time it came out, and, setting aside prototype accuracy, I still think it's well suited to the Siphon. Lima's understated painting and decoration always struck me as good, so why not keep it? The GWR didn't carry Palethorpes traffic in Siphons, but if it had, surely this is close to what it might have looked like? 

Very much at odds with any kind of finescale ethos, then, but fully in keeping with my approach to retaining older models and the memories attached to them.

In similar vein, this Mainline Collett Goods dates back to 1979. It was a Christmas present. Pink Floyd and The Tourists were in the charts! It's far older than the operational lifetime of the prototype locos! In 45 years, it's had very little done to it. The red boiler bands started to wear off so I added transfers, and there's coal in the tender (the glue has gone milky with time). The front buffer beam coupling was to enable it to operate on Bridgend model railway club's 00 exhibition layout - a mate and I were members for a year or so until 1982. I added crew and cab glazing and blackened the wheels and hand rails, but that's it. Perhaps surprisingly, it's always been a good runner - a little noisy, but smooth and controllable down to a decent slow speed. The only other Mainline steam loco I have from a similar vintage is the same, so perhaps they were on to something, with these basic but rugged split-chassis ringfield designs?

Anyway, it's been a bit forlorn and under-loved this last decade or so, as it wasn't fitted with DCC. I looked at various options for a substitute chassis, but none were immediately viable or economical. Instead, in a fit of optimism, I decided to convert it to DCC. This turned out to be remarkably easy, far more so than with the later Bachmann split-chassis designs, because in this case, little dismantling is required and all the main steps are completely reversible - all that's needed is some soldering and a bit of heat-shrink tubing to insulate the brush-holders. The only non-reversible things I did were to drill a small hole into the chassis casting for one pick-up lead (the other can make use of a mounting screw for electrical contact) and then added a series of holes in the tender chassis to get the wiring up and into the tender body, where I put a DCC plug and decoder. The result, with a basic decoder, allowing for it being a ringfield mechanism, is satisfactorily nice and steady running, so welcome back to the fold, 2213. 

I doubt there are many who would bother with such a conversion now, as the newer Bachmann Collett goods is readily available, DCC-compatible (at least the more recent ones), runs well and has some additional details such as tender brake gear, footplate handrails and so on. But the older model still looks really good at normal layout viewing distance, I reckon, and the lined BR livery is a nice variant on the usual plain black. It just shows, I hope, that the best RTR from the mid-late 70s can still hold a place on our layouts.

Cheers and thanks for reading.