This class of narrow-gauge locomotives are quite famous in Japan and at least 2 have been preserved in museums. In the mid 1970s I built an N-gauge kit of Benkei by Crown (actual scale approx 1/106). When I found a 2nd hand copy of the much more detailed 1/50 Nitto kit, I knew I had to build it. It was a lot more tricky than I had imagined as the tooling dates from 1969.

I got the idea for this diorama after finding a second-hand kit of the Deltic prototype locomotive in a bookshop in Melbourne in 2008. The actual locomotive toured the UK in 1959-60 on trials as an a moving advertisement for diesel-electric power. I made all the structures and rolling stock in the diorama from plastic kits, with the exception of the Morris Minor British Rail van. The scene is entirely fictional, though to the best of my knowledge, the items in it are plausible for the period and the Lancashire location.

I made this semaphore signal from a Ratio plastic kit, as a component of a static rail diorama. It was nonetheless a reasonably challenging project in its own right.

I found this bagged kit on sale in a technical bookshop, bought it, started it and bingo, I was into a whole new period of research, kit collecting and building. The tooling of the kit is ancient but it still has pretty good detail. Sadly, there were no clear plastic parts for the windows and one set of steps was also missing. I took a long time for the build and made a lot of improvements along the way based on photos of the actual prototype.

When I designed the 1960 British Rail diorama in 2008, the Airfix 20 ton Brake Van was one of the key items of rolling stock I wanted to include in it. I bought a new Dapol copy of the kit for the purpose. The kit was in poor condition and required a lot of cleanup, repair of broken parts and hot-water treatment of a serious warp in the floor. I put a lot of effort into making a decent model from this humble starting point and am happy with the outcome.

I wanted this model as a component in my BR rail diorama. The idea was that it would look dirty, old and tired, while newer diesel-electric locos in better condition, were nearby. It is not a scenario I celebrate in any way but it is the story of the diorama and this little steam loco is front and centre in it.

When my kids were very young, I used to read them Thomas the Tank Engine books at bedtime. In one of the books, Duck and the Diesel Engine, there was a nasty, oily, diesel-electric shunter that looked just like the 08 Class. Kitmaster made a decent kit of the 08 Class in 1959. I thought one of those would look good in my British Rail diorama. I made the model from a built up glue-bomb Kitmaster 08 which I bought on Ebay as part of a collection. I disassembled, stripped and repaired it with spare parts from another similar 08 glue-bomb. Building the model brought back fond memories of the childrens stories.

Made from a Dapol kit (repop of Airfix) as part of a diorama.

In 2008 I bought a collection of old built-up OO scale railway stuff on Ebay. This old Airfix tank wagon was one of them. It was a genuine glue-bomb, with serious glue damage and a lot of missing parts. I stripped it and replaced the missing parts with spares from other built-ups plus a few handmade bits and pieces. I had intended that it would become a component of a rail diorama set in 1960 - and in 2018 it did.

Airfix’s 1961 Mineral Wagon kit with an added payload of simulated iron-ore. I made this model for the British Rail diorama.

By 2004, after 4 years building only cars and ships, I felt like a change of pace and started this German steam locomotive. I had been interested in steam locos for 30 years but this was the first serious one I attempted. I made a lot of improvements to the kit, the most notable being to add steampipes underneath the boiler and to reconfigure the right side driving rods/running gear to correctly represent the 90-degree phase offset between the left and right sides.This involved cutting apart and then rejoining in different positions, many of the kit parts, and making some new parts from scratch.