Finding my way

Eventually I decided I wanted to indulge my new-found enthusiasm by creating my own mid-Victorian train to run on 00 layouts. I didn’t want to attempt anything too ambitious or spend a fortune. I just wanted to put together rolling stock of a Hornby-level of detail that evokes this lost era. A modest enough ambition I thought; apparently not. There is virtually nothing available in 00 from any major manufacturer that represents this period.

Some models have touched on very late Victorian examples like Triang and then Hornby’s Lord of the Isles. With its big single driving wheels it looks a lot older than it is. In reality these Achillies class locos date from the 1890s.

I then started considering the possibility of modifying something to give a look of the era of locos I was trying to capture. Perhaps I could modify the Lord of the Isles to recreate a LNWR Problem class, the distant ancestor of the Dean Single and possibly the cause of my wife’s ancestor’s demise.

I could remove the cab and do other bits of detailing. Closer inspection showed it would be tricky, particularly as the Problems had outside cylinders with all the linkage that the Lord of the Isle model lacks. Also, the Isles model is not so cheap these days and I didn’t have the confidence to attack one with a hacksaw.

Then I thought of Furness railway’s FR 20. It made sense on a number of fronts. I was brought up in Furness and even remember seeing FR 20s sister loco at Stone Cross school in the 1970s. So there was an emotional attachment. Also, it occurred to me that as it spent much of its life as an 0-4-0 saddle tanker, could I turn a mass produced model of one into a reasonable FR 20. Chances are they would be cheap to buy so I worried less about putting one under the blade.

The clincher was the Furness Railway produces an excellent publication by Tim Owen called The Great Survivor. Not only does it have a history of FR 20 from construction to restoration, it also includes a good set of plans in 7mm scale. That decided it. Furness Railway’s FR 20 was my best chance of creating a loco for my Victorian train.