The mineral engine kit has, as is usual from High Level Model, superb brake gear. The prototype is unusual as all four shoes bear on the rear pair of wheels. This is possibly because it had to handle heavy stone trains or maybe just a foible of Neilson’s.
Construction is very cleverly planned with all parts being easy to assemble. The shoes are three layers of etch and slot into the hanger. A small piece of wire hooks into the chassis so you don’t even have those annoying wires running all the way through and getting in the way. There is certainly no chance of clobbering the coupling rods with this method. In theory you can build the brakes and paint them before attaching to the model. You shouldn’t even need to solder anything to the chassis – I wouldn’t fancy risking this but others might.
Needles to say I managed to screw things up. Making the last brake assembly it pinged off into the distance, never to be found again. I paused for a while (several days) while thinking about the solution. In the end I just used two shoes instead of four. Since the loco isn’t really supposed to appear on the Hellingly Hospital Railway anyway, I think a bit of modellers licence can be applied here.
The rest of the bits fitted well filling up the back of the chassis. That little bit of detail puts some much-needed life into this part of the model. I like to see a bit of complexity below the footplate or it all looks a bit plain. Once upon a time this was how model railway were but nowadays we expect better.
All of this coincided with me dropping the chassis and bending everything behind the gearbox quite a lot. A bit of desoldering the frame spacer and bending the sides cured this but I don’t advise try it !
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