Over the last few years I have acquired a few coaches painted by Larry Goddard.  As you can seen below, these are beautifully painted and, particularly, lined coaches.  Although he is not really building much any more, Larry’s work comes up from time to time on ebay and I have been nabbing a few of these.  They are not particularly cheap, but then there is a fair amount of work in building an etched coach and in reality the price I am paying for them is hardly a fair reflection of this time.

Whilst I have been able to line fairly well in the dim distant past of my teenage years, I don’t think my lining was as good as this and, more importantly, I have misplaced my lining mojo.  Although I have plans to try and rediscover the mojo, these coaches do provide a means to get a few very nice coaches to get the layout moving.

This particular coach is to the LMS’s diagram 1778 and originate from 1925 – 28.  They were the first standard design for the LMS and will have been found throughout their system, including on the Highland section.  My intent for the layout is to have a pair of through trains to Edinburgh/Glasgow with through coaches to London – this  will form part of this.

Whilst the basic building and painting/lining of the coach is top notch, there are some issues that I have sought to deal with.  First of these is that the bogies are fairly clunky and being assembled from components they are unlikely to be truly square.  Thus, I have disassembled these and used them as cosmetic sides to some Bill Bedford sprung bogies.

The coach as built comes with some paper concertina corridor connections – all very 1970s in they look and as they are stretching, they look rather rubbish so off they came.  In their place, I have built some of my etched ones – these are a spin off from the dia 51 full brake kit that I am working on.  This shows them part built and I will be looking to do a posting on these in their own right once I am fully happy with them.

If mucking about and making the coaches for P4 is not sufficient to undermine the resale value of the coach, the final task to weather down the very glossy paintwork will.  These were obviously predominantly aimed at collectors and are finished to showroom standards.  The railways of the steam age were amazingly dirty places and a loco or coach in an ex-works condition would be pretty mucky by the end of its first run, let alone its first year.

Thus, it can not stay as clean and glossy as this, no matter how beautiful it looks.  I have a weathering day planned for a couple of weeks time, and attacking this will be one of the tasks…………..