Magdalen Road Revisited PART 3

Jeremy Buck invites us back for a further tour of the Magdalen Road garden railway.

- Jeremy Buck

A4: Acquisition and early work Early in 2019 I completed a project that had been fifteen years in the making (photo 29).

Although an admirer of Sir Nigel Gresley’s Pacifics, I had never seriously entertained the notion of having one of my own in 5 inch gauge but in 2004 I saw an assembled Winson A4 kit, finished as No 4498, Sir Nigel Gresley advertised for sale on Mike Palmer’s Station Road Steam website. I spent many hours studying the photographs and, although the shortcomings of the streamlined casing were all too apparent (photo 30), I thought the basics looked sound enough (photo 31) and having persuaded myself, and my wife, that this was a rare opportunity that might not come along again, I visited Mike Palmer to have a closer look and took the decision to buy it.

Although there appear to be many Internet forums and websites on the subject, I think that remarkably little has been written in the model engineering press about kit built locomotives. I can think of only three print offerings, all in M.E., one by Doug Hewson, one by Brian Baker and most recently by John Whale. These builders appear not to have encountered problems quite on the scale that I experienced, so the notes that follow may not be representative of the normal experience. I believe that quality was much improved when Modelworks took over after the demise of Winson but I was astonished to discover that even they did not build prototypes to prove the design before putting their kits on the market.