City of Birmingham Locomotive - 1/76 scale

For some time I had wanted to build a model of the Stanier Princess Coronation Class locomotive "City of Birmingham" to display on the IMPS Birmingham stand at model shows. The difficulty in achieving this aim was that the only plastic kit that could be used was the old Rosebud-Kitmaster Duchess of Gloucester which has been out of production since 1961 and consequently the few that turn up on the likes of EBay attract high prices making them more of a collector's investment than a build project. The alternative of using a specialist metal kit was also prohibitively costly. The solution to my dilemma came at the Warley Model Railway Show at the National Exhibition Centre two years ago, I got talking to one of the guys manning the Kitmaster Collector's Club stand about what I wanted to do. He promptly produced a Kitmaster box with artwork for the Battle of Britain Class loco, but inside it there was a Duchess of Gloucester, built after a fashion and badly painted, and offered it to me a reasonable price. My wallet was prized from its usual hiding place and cash exchanged.

That evening I got to work on the model, a quick examination led me to the conclusion that it had been assembled by a youngster, in fact it reminded me of my early efforts, glue in places where it should not be, paint hurriedly and unevenly applied with wavy demarcations. Now, there is nothing wrong with this, after all we all started this way, impatient to get a model together and painted so that everyone could admire our handiwork usually followed by it being played with to destruction or shot to pieces with an air rifle or set fire to in the back garden, ah the nostalgia!

Fortunately for me my Duchess of Gloucester had not suffered the usual fate of young boys' models and the inexpert construction worked to my advantage making it fairly easy to separate the kit parts with only some minor damage to the cab roof.

The next stage was going to be to improve the detailing of the kit and adapt it for my purpose, I will be relating that in future posts. Meanwhile, for those that would like to know more about Rosebud-Kitmaster here is a link to the Kitmaster Collector's Club website;
http://www.rosebud-kitmaster.com