Having got the drivers going smoothly, it was time to build a bogie. Rather than use the Comet bogie, I elected to use one of the fairly new Rumney Models’ LMS bogies. In addition to being sprung, these are more detailed than the Comet equivalents – an hey, I just wanted to give them a try!

The basic concept of the bogie is that there is an inner frame that has hornblocks designed into the etches. These are designed to receive High-Level hornblocks and then in turn the wheels. The sides of the hornguides are formed with the etch visible below; with the base piece subsequently filed away. One thing I did find was that they tended to build a little tight. In building a subsequent bogie, I fitted these with the hornblock in place to make sure that they are sufficiently wide to slide smoothly. However, before doing so, I gave the hornblock a dab of Vasoline, to make sure solder did not gum it up.

Sprining by way of an outer section that bears onto the top of the hornblocks. These are controlled by way of a guitar wire. The image below shows the underside of the inner frame and the yet outer section about to be fitted in place.

And now the completed bogie.

And once it is mounted to the chassis and this is fitted to the body, we have a 2P looking loco.

Having got this far, I turned my attention to the tender. It didn’t take long to decide that the Hornby offering was not worth bothering with; the origins of the Hornby 2P are in the dim distant past and it really shows in the tender. So that went in the bin and I made up a Comet tender. I will show the building of one of these on another project, so as if by magic here it is.

And so it really starts to look like a 2P.

But it was at this stage I decided that the body was a bit compromised too…………….!

To be continued as they say!