On Saturday, I attended the Dapol Collectors Club open day. This was the second year that I have attended and I enjoyed it ever bit as much as the first year. The ability to see Dapol's UK manufacturing arm, ask questions and see machinery, such as their injection moulding machines, work as well as enjoy several exhibition layers and a couple of traders makes this a very different event to other exhibitions. My thanks go out to the staff at Dapol for organising and staffing this day and I look forward to attending again next year.
During the day, I picked up three non running N Gauge locomotives. These were two additional Halls (for conversion into Altantics) and a valanced A4 in the guise of Mallard for the sum total of £95 (£5 over budget though!). Finding myself with a bit of free time yesterday, I tinkered with these and got all three running!
Above is Mallard. Having braced myself for the potential task of having to completely strip and rebuild this loco, I found that the problems were that both the loco to tender wires had been broken, the drive shaft had been removed (found in the bottom of the box) and that the tender drawbar had been removed and incorrectly refitted causing the first three tender wheels to be lifted off the track (and cause insufficient pickup to turn the motor). The replacement/repairs (the spares/detailing pack was still in the box) took 25 minutes and now Mallard runs as well as any other A4 I have.
The tender will need some modest modification as Dapol, I assume constrained by tooling costs, have fitted the closest example from their existing range of tender bodies. This will be relatively simple requiring the beading to be removed and a streamlined cover fitted to the front of the tender. However, this will require a repaint of the tender and I'll take the opportunity to replace the numbers as well to maintain a consistent style and straighten them out a little.
The two Halls, Priory Hall just needed a traction tire resetting on its wheel as it had come off and gotten tangled between the wheel and coupling rod. Cranmore Hall was in much the same condition as Mallard but with the additional complication of having a snapped drawbar. As I will not be using the existing drawbars and having been offered a fair price from a 2mm finescale modeller for the body, I stripped this one down yesterday and fitted my last set of spare Dapol Britannia wheels to bring it to the same state as the concept model shown on the previous page.
My planned conversion into Atlantics is quite involved and only a few key parts from the Halls will make it into the final locomotives. However, the price of these non-runners was less than the cost of the component parts as spares (assuming that all are available) and the process of stripping the first one down has given me an understanding of the design and some ideas how I'll have to design the Atlantic body to best utilise the existing fixing points.
In all seriousness, I ended up having to be really careful designing the County as I kept looking at the next set of drawings on the opposite page - silly on my part really as the County was the only GWR 4-6-0 with continuous splashers! 
