This concludes the series of posts on the building of a 009 (1:76 scale) model of Manning Wardle 0-6-2ST Canopus built for the Pentewan Railway, as a fictitious 5th loco for my Snailbeach District Railways / Shropshire Minerals Light Railway layout Pontesbury Sidings. The loco has been built from the rather infamous Backwoods Miniatures "craftsman" kit, which I bought second hand and part built.
At the end of the last part I had completed the assembly of the chassis and body parts, and so it was time to paint the body before adding the remaining details. I thought long and hard about whether to go with lined green livery, but opted for unlined black with red buffer beams; this is supposed to be a Col Stephen's purchase after 1923 and that was his paint scheme, so black it was.
The basic paint job was very easy, a couple of light coats from a rattle-can of black primer did the job. At this point I brush painted the interior of the cab - a sort of light mustard colour. I masked the buffer beams and spayed them red with my airbrush (Badger signal red with a few drops of Boston & Maine maroon). I added front and rear couplers. As the SDR used a central buffer / coupler rather than the twin buffers of the Pentewan Railway I attached a chunky white-metal casting at the front, to represent an industrial type buffer block - but fabricated a self centring Greenwich coupler held in place with the body mounting screw for the rear - all of my 009 stock has a hook at one end and a loop at the other only.
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| Canopus in basic paint |
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| Self-centering rear coupler |
The final step was to add the remaining cast and etched brass detail parts. This included injectors, lubricators, spectacle and name plates, a tool box and the large and prominent jack. The glazing for the spectacle plates always needs to be glued in place with something other than CA otherwise you end up with frosted glazing - I usually use thick PVA and a micro-brush.
I added hand lettered "No. 5" to the buffer beams - the SDR locos during the Stephens era all had hand painted lettering in this fashion; I used a white 0.3mm disposable drawing pen (my wife is a crafter and this is a side effect of her ordering interesting paper craft items from Japan, the model railway hobbyist should always consider interesting items from other similar disciplines!).
To make the uninteresting black paint scheme stand out I added some layers of weathering - one of my favorite parts of the modelling hobby; various washes, dry brushing and finally some toning coats of soot and grime from the airbrush - the aim was to make the loco well used, but not just about to be scrapped! I added a footplate crew to hide the motor and flywheel which are prominent in the cab - as usual I used Falcon Figures. Finally, I tacked the cab roof in place with thick PVA so it can be easily pried off without damage if needs be.
Loco complete! I have found that although Canopus will run reasonably well with either controller better slow speed results are usually obtained with the Gaugemaster model UF (feedback) controller; the small Mashima 5 pole motor is cored and there appears to be no issues with overheating, and there are no small components to fry like in the Bachmann Baldwins.
Canopus was challenging to build, but the result is reasonably good. Running qualities are good, with slow speeds suitable for a poorly maintained narrow gauge railway, but gear noise especially running forward is quite excessive - about which I am not sure I can really do anything.
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