It always makes me a little sad when I come across toybox clearance auctions on-line where parents have deemed that a child has 'outgrown' certain toys. That's how I lost my Hornby clockwork trainset when I was a kiddie. I was deemed by my parents to have outgrown it and it was passed onto to some horrible Visigoth of a relative's child.
That doesn't stop me from buying useful bits and bobs from these toybox clearance auctions though which is how I've come to own four Greendale Rockets and various Duplo Thomas the Tank Engine odds and ends.
The Duplo tender blocks are perfect to represent a certain variety of small Garratt water tank so they were grabbed out of my stock of down on their luck toys. I own a lot of Lego train motor blocks from my former Lego layout so combining those bits with a Greendale Rocket bodyshell seemed to be totally logical to me.
Just lately while waiting for the glue to dry on more 'serious' railway/tramway projects I started to look at the whole Greendale Garratt idea a little more closely. In the end I picked up my razor saw, - which as it happens is a lovely fine toothed cabinetmakers saw and is much better to use than the little modelmaker's razor saws sold in shops. And I proceeded to cut up a pair of Greendale Rockets.
What I ended up with was this........
Looking at it all this morning I did a spot of cut and pasting in MS Paint and I ended up with this.........
Now we're starting to get somewhere methinks
My Greendale Garratt is beginning to look like a small colonial Garratt and that's exactly wot I want. For some reason New Zealand missed out on having any small Garratts; - though we did have double and single Fairlies which is nice. Later on the government imported some large double Pacific Garratts, but they were a flawed design and were a failure.
Steam Incorporated here in NZ recently imported a Class 15A Garratt from Zimbabwe for hauling enthusiast specials. Fun fact, - the various preservation societies here in NZ between them own more passenger coaches (including heritage coaches) than Kiwi Rail owns itself. This Class 15A Garratt demonstates how things might have been if the NZ Government Railways had let Beyer-Garratt use its considerable experience and get on with it without interfering with the design process. But enough of that, I shall get off my soapbox now
Solvent glues are no good for me healthwise so for plastic I use the type of hi-tech two part glue that has an activator. The resulting joint is very strong. I need to order in some plasticard too as I don't normally use it. Something tells me that trying to use card and plywood instead wouldn't be very successful.
