“Hey Ade, what happened to that Rapier kit you got?” The body shell of the IP Engineering Rapier diesel is, as you can see, assembled. It’s taken about two weeks to get to this point, or roughly four hours of actual work. Now all I have to do is avoid wasting all this effort by making a hash of the chassis.

The kit went together fairly easily, although I should perhaps have obeyed my GRA’s advice to read the instructions in full first, as I would then have realised that the engraved sides of the end pieces are supposed to face out so that you can position the buffer blocks correctly. (Alternatively, the instructions could have mentioned this in the first place, thus saving me from myself.) I used superglue to assemble the parts, as I couldn’t face waiting 24 hours between each join. This works reasonably well, although it tends to soak into the wood, causing the first attempt at a join to fail. (Update after RTFM: Loctite suggest dampening porous surfaces prior to applying the glue.) However, as all the joints are along edges, they don’t have much strength, so I have glued short sections of 5mm square section stripwood in the corners to provide additional bonding surfaces for the glue. I’ve managed to recall enough basic electrics and soldering to wire in a reversing switch, using a DPDT mini-toggle left over (still in its packet!) from the remains of the N gauge layout. (I understand NATO are dropping back to DefCon 4 any day now.) Ideally, it would have been the centre-off type, but this was not the sort I had.

For livery, I’ve gone with Humbrol Brunswick Green, as I’m a firm traditionalist (and again, I had some handy). Although I’m starting to think that crimson can be very attractive; perhaps it’ll be green for diesels and red for steam. Or perhaps it doesn’t matter. Somehow, I forgot how to paint bare wood and skipped the primer. The resulting grained finish is attractive but looks wrong on a locomotive; I’m sure someone can point me to pictures of prototype wooden-bodied diesels, but I feel it ought to look like a metal body. Still, first effort so I’m not going to sweat the details.

All that remains is to insert the motor, then attach the axle boxes and wheels. I would have done this last night but life intervened once more. This looks like the trickiest part, so fingers crossed. One approach that is definitely handy is to keep the model and all your tools on a tray, so that it can be stored safely up high, away from Little Fingers Of Destruction, and taken down when there’s a spare hour.

Outside, autumn continues in full cry, with lashing gales and heavy rain, and thick clumps of fallen leaves accumulating on the curves of the line. I’d like to have a complete circuit ready by the time this loco is running, but it looks unlikely unless the weather abates. On the contradictory hand, I don’t want a finished line with nothing to run on it either…