Since the 1970s David has been building model trains with battery powered engines (around 15 of them) and 60-odd wagons. He told his wife he wouldn’t build any more due to lack of storage. However, he couldn’t resist this kit from Hobbies. It is made by a Spanish company called OcCre. He completed it during the Covid-19 ‘lockdown’.

David is interest in trams began as a boy when he lived just outside London. His mother used to take him and his sister up to London for a day out. After a visit to the famous teahouse at London Bridge for breakfast, they used to ride around London on the trams. On one occasion he rode the trams on the last day they went under the Thames.

He was to come across the trams many years later when he worked in India, with his headquarters in Calcutta, which was where all the London trams ended up. You can go for miles on these trams. If you went out of Calcutta first thing in the morning, you have the tram to yourself. You could travel for an hour or two, come back and you would miss all the crowds.

This London tram, subject of the model, is London County Council (L.C.C.) No.106 and still exists at The Tramway Village at Crich, within an hour’s drive of Derby, Stoke, Leicester, Sheffield, Nottingham and Doncaster.

When David bought the kit, he had no idea what he was buying. He had been used to making his railway rolling stock, but compared with the tram, was very simple to build from scratch, with just the wheels, gears and motors being bought in.

This was a new ‘adventure’. It was designed as a static model that was not intended to run. However, David thought he would like it to run on his garden railway, which was the object of the exercise.

The project has taught David a lot about different materials. One such material, which he had not used before, is plywood, which when soaked in water can be shaped, and then keeps that shape when it dries. This is how the curved end panels on the front and back of the tram are made. He found a paint tin which was just the right diameter to shape the plywood.

There are nearly six hundred parts in the tram. It comes in six sheets of plywood, where the parts are presented in a very efficient pattern with parts inside parts, for example.

David uses ordinary commercial paint. His railway is painted with outdoor paint as it has to withstand the weather, although modellers’ paint would give a better finish. He has learnt other new things, for instance, how to glue brass wire to ply wood. It is quite tricky, but Bostick or Superglue is the best.



Everything moves, including the sliding doors to the cabin. The figures were bought from Taiwan.

Unfortunately, there isn’t an overhead wire on his garden railway. When the original tram got to the end of its journey, the conductor would go to the top deck and move the trolley pole around, and tip all the seats to face the other way. The seats tip on the model. It took about an hour to finish each of the seats.

What the picture below shows is how OcCre build their models around a ‘box’. Building models for the 16mm railway, there is a rule that something should ‘look right’ from two metres away. This means that a lot of detail is not necessarily put on the inside of a model.

This tram is quite different. There are 40  pieces in the ‘box’ itself. The seats are all slatted. The interior detail is quite complex.

Before it is put together, parts have to be fully or partially painted. David had never done this before.

The staircase is self-supporting and each step has six pieces. It was more detailed and complicated than anything David had done previously, like the sliding door.



It is designed to run on a 45mm track width (Gauge 1). It is basically a G-scale model. The scale in the garden is 16mm to the foot with a track width 32mm.

David bought wheels and built his own power unit into the base. He also usually bought gear wheels. In the 1970s, when he started, it was easy to buy gear wheels from Bonds O’Euston Road. With the advent of laser printing, gear wheels and gear boxes can be easily printed and was used to build the tram running gear.

The wheels are set to the track width of the garden railway which is 32mm. This goes back to the 1930s when Welsh engineers were trying to make working steam models of Welsh narrow-gauge engines. In the 1930s the only model railway track available was the old O-gauge tin plate with its 32mm track width.

David belongs to the 16mm Narrow Gauge Model Railway Society and Pickering Experimental Engineering and Model Society.


 

LONDON TRAM 1903

David Hampshire

https://www.sarikhobbies.com/model-engineer-builder/

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