After (a lot of) swearing and cursing I have finally managed to complete a card Rheidol loco. It does look a poor battered little thing!

I thought that I would be clever and “borrow” a sheet of card that my wife uses to make greetings cards. I think that it may be a little thick for this model. The card works fine for greetings cards but did not like been shaped for small parts and the tabs had a habit of de-laminating where they hold the various bits of the model together. I did try printing another sheet on to paper so that I could have double sided vacuum pipes and tank filler vents and tank filler handles, and it has sort of worked. I can’t help the thought that the steam dome looks a little like a milk can!

I also “borrowed” my wife’s set of Promarkers to touch in the edges and they have done a good job of covering the white card on the score lines.

The much larger loco is a 1:24 card mock-up of one of the Kimberley Diamond Mine Bagnalls. Its hard to believe that they are 18 inch gauge. It got put together a few years ago in a period of boredom over the Christmas break, enlarged from the drawing in the Mark Smithers book on 18 inch gauge railways. That card mock-up started me on modelling in 1:24 scale and some of the models have subsequently appeared in the Review. It really is about time that I got around to converting the card mock-up in to something “proper”.

As for would I build another card Rheidol loco, the answer is NO. It was far too small and fiddly for me, and card does not file very well - it goes all fuzzy! You cannot solder it together either……...

Can you let me know if you have a problem detaching the photos from this please. I have an iMac and sent some photos as an attachment to someone with a Windows machine. He could not disentangle them from the text so they ended up being transferred on a memory stick.

Regards

Steve