LMS BOLSTER & GWR PROVENDER WAGONS

This Ian Kirk kit has been lingering in a box of unmade kits for years, since purchase from the now-defunct Dean Sidings in Lydney, for the princely sum of £3.00. Complete with a set of Keen Maygib brass wheels and bearings, plus a lovely set of turned brass buffers, it's a jolly nice kit to work with. However, there was a fair bit of flash to remove from the various plastic bits, especially the solebars and brake gear. 

I've added some safety hoops from brass strip to enhance the underframe but otherwise, what you see is what you got in the kit. These kits are hard to come by these days, with the Kirk range now concentrating on 'O' gauge products. Built as part of a wider feature that I'm working on for Model Rail, the finished wagon will gain a load of timber logs. 

Also now ready for priming and painting is this interesting Coopercraft kit of a GWR provender (horse feed) wagon. Cheap and excellently rendered, the Coopercraft wagons literally fall together and you even get a little piece of metal to form a ballast weight (sealed in place with a discreet plastic cover under the floor. The transport of animal feeds to railway installations on the GW system was a serious business, necessitating the building of a dedicated fleet of wagons to move the straw from the Didcot depot to outlying areas. While this isn't really my period or sphere of operations, this wagon is destined to enter service as part of the NCB fleet on my colliery layout.