Canvey Railway and Model Engineering Club.
A few years ago a fiend let my wife drive his gauge 1 Freightliner on the Chelmsford track. She decided that she needed her own loco. After some searching it was decided that it would be a Class 37 painted up in The Royal Scotsman livery.
The kit consisted of white metal castings for details such as the buffers and dummy axel boxes and brake parts plus the front and back of the cab. The cab and the internal parts, buffer beam, etc. were made up from etched brass sheet. A hundred-watt iron was need to solder everything together. The casings at either end of the cab just didn't fit and I had to sort them out in the milling machine. The bogies were purchased ready assembled but, as you can see in one of the photos, there were quite a few pieces to be added around the outside.
Well detailed coaches can cost £1000 pounds each, but a live steam G1 can be around £3000. If it's your main hobby then you might think that's OK. Our coaches were bought second hand from a large stock owned by a club member who had passed away. A close look would show that they are fully of Chinese tourists.
Around the same time as I worked on the Class 37, I acquired a rather worn 4-4-0 steam loco. I believe it was a freelance build and it came from the member just mentioned. It is spirit fired and while it ran OK after sorting out the cylinders and other parts, it's a bit of a fiddle. There is a risk of burning your expensive track if you set the spirit flow too high. I have therefore started to look at changing to gas firing.
As already noted, rolling stock can be expensive. The owner of the Freightliner had found a source of Garden Gauge wagons for £25 each. While Garden Gauge and G1 use the same track, GG is around 40% bigger. I got a few wagons and took them apart and then ran a slitting saw down the middle a couple of times to take out a slice to make the width to G1 scale. I guess they are rather long but some wagons are.
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