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Sunday, 26 March 2023

Slaters O Gauge Conflat

Well the last few years have been pretty hectic with moving around - we have moved again and it is our 3rd home in 3 years. However - the best news is - this is our forever home - or at least our very, very long term home. The bad news about this move is that - my time has been sucked away into house repairs almost continually! This has left little time for modelling. The other very bad news about the house move from a modelling perspective, is that although I have lots of opportunity for a modelling room - I do not currently have a room where I can operate my layouts.  This is limiting layout progress, so I am currently focusing on building some wagons.

Built Conflat A ready for painting.


The latest off the workbench is a Slaters Conflat A wagon. This wagon has pretty terrible instructions - and the break gear is a nightmare to assemble, as shown in the picture instructions. I pretty much had to rebuild the wagon underframe part way through - which was a bit of pain, but finally it has been finished off. I am now building a Slaters Lowfit wagon and I am trying to assemble the brake gear first, before gluing the completed assembly to the wagon - I think this will work a lot better.


The completed underframe of the Conflat A wagon.

Alongside the Conflat A/Lowfit I have been tinkering with a Parkside Fruit D in OO gauge.  This will be onw of the final wagons to go in my engineering olive green train. It is interesting how small I am finding the OO gauge wagons now - they are tiny in comparison to the O gauge stuff. I think that once I have finished the detailing on Pottington Quay - I might solely focus on O gauge - as I am finding it a much more enjoyable scale to model in. However - I will keep the Pottington Quay layout for running trains in OO gage as I have previously finished off so many trains and kits! There has also been a little painting going on recently - the O gauge class 25 is nearly completion, amongst other projects - so some little slow, but steady progress.