G & SW Brake Van in primer

G & SW brake van in Halford's Acid 8 Primer.



G & SW brake van from a Taff Vale/Dragon kit with improvements and interior detail.

The rather scrappy appearance of the finished brass model is much improved by a unifying coat of Halford's Acid 8 primer. The wheel treads have been masked off with Tamiya masking tape, the buffers and couplings have been removed and chemically blackened. The running gear and footboards, all below the solebars in fact, will be airbrushed matt black though the remainder of the model, including the interior, will be hand painted.

G&SWR Brake Van Inside and Out.

G & SWR Drummond Brake Van Interior

Apart from the brake hand wheel, which is in the post from LGM, the interior fittings are complete though I plan to add a few more small items, a sweeping brush and possibly a few of the guard's personal items, later at the painting stage. The stove is a brass casting from Slaters, the stove pipe is threaded 10BA to take the screw in the chimney above which holds the roof in place. The brake mechanism in the left hand corner is a w/m casting from Invertrain's "Heroes of the Footplate" range ; everything else in the van interior I made myself.
There are no photos extant of G & SWR brake van interiors, in fact interior details of pre-grouping brake vans are in short supply in general. However I was helped by a drawing of a Caledonian Railway 6-wheel brake van which showed some of the interior fittings, the rest is a reconstruction based on probability. There is not much room left in the interior when all the fittings are in place so I presume that these vans were not used for carrying small consignments of freight nor even parcels as there just isn't room.



It's a busy place under the van

The brake rigging seen here is built from the etches in the kit though the manner in which the central supports are mounted is of my own devising. The replacement self contained buffers simplify matters beneath the van, which the transverse piano wire arrangement of the kit might have complicated unnecessarily, leaving plenty of room for the coupling hook spring seen in the foreground.

G & SWR Brake Van More Progress

G & SW Railway 16T Drummond Brake Van interior

The interior furnishings of the brake van are in place now so the superstructure is almost complete. The stove is screwed in place from beneath and I plan to put a screw down the chimney and into the stove pipe to fix the roof in place. In the corner is a locker complete with hinges and a lock which sits between the inner wall and the guard's lookout seat. The brake mechanism and inside brake wheel take up the near corner of the van as seen in this view, though not yet in place I have castings for this that I made for a CR van. A high desk in the corner opposite the locker completes the furnishing. There is ample scope for more incidental details, a sweeping brush, a bucket of coal, a lamp and maybe the guard's log book and pencil and of course the guard himself.

Interior details of safety bar and locker. 

In this view you can see that the safety bar across the open veranda is in fact an articulated hasp and staple arrangement, the workings of which are not apparent from outside. A top rail needs to be added to the van interior to complete the inner structure.
There's not much space inside now that the van is furnished for parcels or small consignments of goods and I'm not sure that these vans carried them, if they did they'd have to be small!