1. It's perhaps a little perverse, but one of the aspects I particularly like about railway modelling is going back to models completed 3-4 years ago and realising that if I was building them now, both the process and the end product would probably be quite different. You learn as you go along, each kit sees a new approach, technique or style being tried out somewhere in the construction. If the end result is any good, it gets repeated on the next one, where another new thing is tried out, which if it proves to be any good..... So an evolutionary process therefore, and looking at it critically now 3 years on, the Baby Warship will have to have a refit at some stage in the future...

2. The Worsley Works class 22 kit was the first etched-brass loco kit I built. Perhaps not the first one I'd started, but the first one I actually finished. As I remember, I bought the kit at the Pentonville meet in November 2002, and if I've got the year right, then it had been commissioned and supported by a group of around 10 modellers (of which I was one) at the previous Pentonville in 2001.

She was finished in time to be displayed at the 3mm Society AGM in bristol in 2004, so a build-time of 1 1/2 years.

3. The chassis comes from one of these, the E.German TT producer "Zeuke" (later, after being forcibly nationalised by the State in the '60s as part of the Socialist State plan-economy, named "Volks-Eigene-Betrieb Berliner TT Bahnen") e499 Soviet Russian Bo-Bo electric loco. Despite these being 1950's technology from behind the Iron Curtain, they're actually not at all bad! (They certainly knock the equivalent UK Tri-Ang offerings of the same era into a cocked hat.) When properly cleaned and maintained, they are powerful and surprisingly smooth mechanisms, although the cylindrical BTTB motor and plastic balljoint driveshafts do make a rather distinctive noise.

4. There are several good reasons why you want to use one of these, even though made in scale 1:120, when you measure the components in 3mm scale at 1:100:
- the wheel diameters are correct. (3' 6")
- the bogie wheelbase is correct. (8' 6")
- the bogie center-to-centre is close (compromise of only a few inches is acceptable).
- the wheels are spoked, just like the prototype.
- they can be obtained directly from Germany for around £15 plus postage (speaking German makes this easier though.)
- the donor chassis can be made to fit with only minor surgery.
- whitemetal sideframes and couplings can be fitted to the bogies relatively easily.
- the discarded orginal sideframes are then a source of sideframe detail (axle covers, springs, sand boxes, etc...) for other scratchbuilding activity.
- after you've butchered the body you've got a set of pantographs ready for if Worsley Works ever produce a Woodhead class 76 Bo-Bo electric loco kit. (Mmmmmm...)

The original 1950's Zeuke metal chassis shown is easier to work with than the later 1960's plastic BTTB version.

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