A4 Pacific Sir Nigel Gresley, O-scale

[Erik Zwaan]

Back from summer vacation and time to start a new build. I must admit to prefer building flying things such as airplanes and birds and the occasional something traditionally architectural but it’s time for a change. Papertrade published this wonderful O-scale (1:48) A4 Pacific steam locomotive earlier this year, obtainable in hardcopy and download via - Zeist Bouwplaten - Import, verkoop, ontwerp en productie van papieren schaalmodellen, maquettes en bouwplaten (cardmodels), Modelbouw, Rietveld cutoutmodels and I’m just curious about building such a great machine. I’ve never built a steam locomotive before so it will be sort of a quest, undoubtedly complete with all the inevitable humps during the journey. Well, that’s part of the charm.

The A4 Pacific locomotives served on the long distance railway tracks in Great Britain between the mid-1930s and 60s and several speed records were set by these wind tunnel designed machines. Pre-war record was 126 mph by the “Mallard” and the post-war record of 112 mph was reached by the “Sir Nigel Gresley”, being the subject of this model and named after the designer of the A4 series.

Out of the 35 operational A4’s only six still exist and are kept alive and kicking by various musea and private organisations. The Gresley for instance is preserved by the A4 Locomotive Preservation Society and the Mallard can be seen in the National Railway Museum in York. Several film clips can be found on YouTube as well as pictures and other information on the internet about these great machines, which provide a wealth of background information. Perhaps useful to enhance the model with a few extra details during the build.

Back to the model. It consists of 8 A3 size sheets, folded and stapled in a neat A4 booklet, looking very attractive and detailed and was designed by the Dutch graphical designer Cor van Haasteren, who has designed several models for Papertrade in the recent years. All together the model has some 400 parts.

A laser set is also available, which contains the most delicate parts that otherwise would have to be laminated with 1mm thick board. I decided to order this set as it would be finger breaking work to have to cut out all the spokes of the wheels and rods of the gear mechanism, as to mention a few of the complicated parts.

There’s also a short erratum list, concerning mainly typos in the part numbers, instruction drawing and a non-critical scaling error in the formers of the steam boiler. Not really something to worry about and a pdf is provided with proper scaling instructions for printing when you order the model.

It took me some time to study the parts sheets and the building instructions. It is recommended starting with the tender body as this is a rather straight-forward section of the model and I duly followed this advice.

Although the real machine appears to have a glossy surface, for the time being I have sprayed all sheets with eggshell matt varnish before starting to cut. Varnishing provides better paper strength and it’s my experience that it does not really impact bonding, either when using white paper glue or acetate based glue like Bison, UHU or Velpon.

Herewith the first pictures to show you this project has been kicked off!

Erik