Wee Ben; engine and tender.

Last Saturday I took the Wee Ben up to a Running Day at the Carlisle and District 0 Gauge Group (CD0GG) clubroom under the Citadel Station. The Group have a spacious double track layout with generous six foot radius curves and a developing scenic section. I had weighted the engine with 50g of lead strip in the boiler, which bore down on the front bogie, which has quite a lively coil spring between it and the engine; without the weight the front driver would have had little traction. She ran smoothly, with a train of six carriages, the front bogie solid, keeping the track well and guiding the engine into the curves, points and crossings, which she negotiated effortlessly, until…disaster! One of the crankpin nuts worked loose and fell off onto the track; and, as the coupling rod itself worked its way up the crankpin to follow it, the engine came to a jerky and undignified halt. Anyway at least up to that point she’d performed well on her first outing in public and the solution was simple; I’ll fit locking nuts to the crankpins, using the method that Nick Baines describes on his website; that’ll fix it. It’ll not be until after Christmas when I can get up to Carlisle again and I hope to have made a good deal of progress on the Ben by then. I’m still struggling at the moment trying to make the angle trim that fits between the spectacle plate, splashers and the boiler; it’s slow progress. However most of the rest of the detail is in plastic bags on my bench, finished and ready to add to the engine as soon as the trim is in place.