Carrying on from yesterday’s post, the M7 was switched for a terrier.  Certainly one of my favourite classes of locomotive, my childhood visits to the Kent and East Sussex Railway and occasional special visits to the Bluebell Railway meant I’ve seen many terriers!  This 00 scale model was manufactured by Dapol, before the tooling was sold to Hornby.  I am lucky to have three (LBSCR 55 Stepney, KESR 3 Bodiam and Southern W11 Newport) and a half (used for spares) examples of this class on my layout.

As I’m sure many of you are aware, the class had many detail variations and the Dapol/Hornby model does not cater well for all of these.  One of these is the location of the sandboxes – as you can see I’ve attempted to remove the sandboxes from the splasher, as per the (preserved) prototype.  Other modifications to model include adding a smokebox extension ring and a new smokebox face (unfortunately Dapol’s smokeboxes usually had a number-plate moulded into non-British Rail examples).  It has had a DCC decoder hard-wired to the motor (a fairly simple task – Hornby’s website provides good instructions to do this).  The model runs nicely, if a little noisy compared to modern mechanisms.

I have also fitted a Golden Arrow extended bunker to my Isle of Wight terrier, but I’ll cover that in another post in the future!