A RATHER SPECIAL PROJECT.                              by Philip Worsfold

Introduction.

I had a friend in France – Bernard Bos – who was my sort of doppelganger. The similarities in our lives were awesome – virtually the same age; similar tastes in the models we chose; married within a week of each other to ladies who, side by side, could have passed as sisters…  Sadly, Bernard died in 2022 after having been unwell for a number of years, spending the last 12 months of his live in the be all and end all of an old peoples’ home, where he even had his personal wine cellar!!  Fortunately we were able to see him there shortly before he passed away.  On our previous meeting in 2017, when he was already too unwell to continue modelling, he had given me his uncompleted DJH kit of a De Glehn Compound 4-4-2 Atlantic of the Nord Railway of France – the effective prototype of what G.J. Churchward purchased for the Great Western Railway as No 101 – La France.. On the later visit, I was able to show him the results of my efforts to complete his model, which had proved quite a challenge.  He was very pleased with the results and, to me; the model has become his memorial. 
This is the story of what I did.
 
Part One – The Tender.

At the time of his illness he had almost completed the model – the version with the earlier 6-wheel tender – but he had made some significant modifications to the kit.  Whilst it looked lovely in its raw white-metal and brass, there was no instruction leaflet and there was a problem – or three! 

Bernard had evidently forgotten that, whilst his layout worked on a 12 volt 3-rail stud contact system, using Märklin type skid pickups, mine was standard analogue 2-rail DC.  If the model was to run on my layout, it would have to be converted to 2-rail.  Furthermore, he had always regarded the DJH chassis design and pickup system as a bit primitive by today’s standards and had opted to fit a better motor, relocated in that 6-wheel tender.  He had achieved this with some success, albeit more than filling up the coal bunker but quite cleverly disguised by adding raised sides – as later fitted to the originals in  real life.  He appears to have used the gear train and wheels (with traction tyres) from an old Jouef bogie tender to drive the two rear axles of the tender and had got as far as fitting rather neat droppers to the front pair of wheels to provide the earth side contact for the power supply.  This pair of wheels was fitted to a sub-frame made from the front section of the part from the kit.  The droppers stood proud of this frame to locate in small holes in the tender footplate.  Actually only one of this pair of wheels was insulated, so one of the droppers wasn’t really necessary; but it gave me the opportunity to devise my conversion. 

I removed one of the droppers, drilled out the hole and glued in a short piece of plastic tube, filed flush with the top of the sub-frame.  I then soldered a piece of thin insulated wire onto the recovered dropper; shortened it so that when one end was glued into the plastic tube, it no longer stood proud.  The wire pressed tightly against the bottom end of the tube and passed through the small gap between the front edge of the sub frame and the front buffing plate of the tender. The bottom of the drop wire now provided a contact insulated from the rest of the tender.   With the body in place, the axle box and front step hid all this from view.  First problem solved.

The can type motor with flywheel (remarkably like the one I subsequently found and had to replace in my very expensive French Pacific) was held in place simply by means of a flat brass plate which slid between one of its flat faces and a brass rod soldered between the two inside faces of the bunker –quite a precision job.  A front plate on the tender body prevented it moving forward and held it square in place.  The system made for simple removal or replacement of the motor, so I decided to maintain this facility by making my new wiring system permit the removal of the motor without any un-soldering. 

The earth side was simple – just soldering a wire to one motor terminal and squeezing the loose end between the brass fixing plate and the cross rod; which made the motor fixing more secure into the bargain.  The wire from the other terminal passed through a gap in the tender footplate into a slot cut in the front wheel assembly to locate between these wheels.  At first I attached on the end of this wire a small home-made ‘one pin mini plug and socket’ arrangement, but as this was not entirely satisfactory, I have replaced it recently with a more reliable commercial product.  I soldered to the loose end of the wire from the tender wheels initially to the home-made socket, lately replaced with a commercial one.  Doing this solved the second problem but also enabled me to fix problem no 3 and fit pickups to the rear pony truck and driving wheels of the locomotive.
 
Part two – The Locomotive.

Here I was presented with my third problem.  Because the model had originally been intended for a 3-rail system, no attempt had been made to provide any insulation at all, although the bogie and truck axles, provided with the kit happened to have both wheels insulated.  The Romford driving wheels  however were non-insulated on both sides.  These – or at least one side – would have to be replaced.  I thought it best to replace all four wheels, but first I needed to find out precisely what size they were.  
With my limited measuring facilities it is difficult to decide whether the wheels were 22mm or 23mm diameter.  And I needed to find a supplier.  ‘Original’ Romford wheels were difficult to find in these two popular sizes.  Mabar made wheels of apparently suitable size, to fit Romford axles, but the two of the right size were specific to particular British locos (in ‘00’ scale) and didn’t look right.  But ScaleLink make an insulated version of the Romford type wheels.  My ideal solution would be to replace just two of the wheels on the locomotive with ScaleLink wheels.  There was even a suitable pickup in the kit.  My seeking advice from Model Loco bore no fruit but taking a wheel to the local club established that it was 22mm diameter.  So I ordered four 22mm wheels from ScaleLink – just in case! 

When they arrived checking against the two wheels still on the chassis showed them to be too small!  Further checking showed that I had received a model with one pair of 22mm driving wheels and one pair of 23mm diameter!  Hence my confusion; Bernard had got the wheels from an État Pacific he was building at the same time muddled up with those for the Atlantic.  23mm was correct and ScaleLink kindly offered an exchange. Since the ScaleLink insulated wheels were such a good match to the existing 23mm wheels, I was able to adopt the ‘one side insulated’ arrangement to make the pickups simpler and allow space for some semblance of brake rigging.  The brake blocks are particularly prominent, especially to the rear drivers and pony truck, so needed to be modelled.  I used the standard Model Loco pickup parts to supply the insulated driving wheels, the wire being threaded through the chassis and ending with my one pin plug beneath the tender. 
I assembled the locomotive and tried it out to see if it would work.  To my surprise it did, far better than I had expected.  Without instructions, I had to use some imagination for the brake rigging, which apart from the cross ties and the brakes themselves is indicative and made from plastic rod to avoid short circuits.  I tried to fit the front brake blocks, which fit between the bogie and the front driving wheels, partly hidden by the cylinders.  There was insufficient clearance to fit them in the same manner as the rear two pairs, so I tried to mount them on the end of a plastic rod, so that they could deflect when the bogie moved.  But the vertical clearance was so tight that the cross member rubbed on the rails and snapped off when it reached the first set of points.  So I abandoned that idea and decided to leave off the front, almost hidden pair of brake blocks. 
I had a working model; but it was still bare metal.
 
Part three – Painting

Should I paint the model?  Or should I leave it as it was – it looked good that way.  I decided to have a go.  But what colour should it be?  Should it be Nord chocolate or SNCF black as a 221A.  Bernard’s old picture suggested that he would have gone for the latter; but the SNCF stock list for 1950 does not list any 221’s on the Nord region, so they’d probably not made it through the war, apart from the preserved one; and it would be unlikely that they would have been repainted in SNCF colours even if they received their SNCF numbers.  So I decided on ‘Nord’ chocolate.  I scoured the internet for pictures of Nord locos to get some idea of the right colour.  My research suggested that there were wide variations.  The Atlantic in the French Railway Museum at Mulhouse is a completely different shade of brown from an ex Nord 4-6-0 De Glehn at a French working museum (This is 3.628 which was saved by a couple of railwaymen from Ashford and ran for several years on the Nene Valley Railway before being repatriated to France).  I decided that the chocolate on 3.628 looked nicer – the Mulhouse colour is almost Pullman umber. 
Buying several pots of various browns from the Humbrol paints range, I found a pretty good match in ‘German Army Camouflage Red/Brown matt’.  I sprayed on first grey primer then matt black before applying the chocolate by hand.  With hindsight it might have been easier if I’d sprayed the chocolate and applied the black by hand, because the chocolate predominates.  But I got there in the end and I liked what I saw.  But there was an awful lot of yellow lining on the locomotive at Mulhouse – including double lining on the boiler bands and edging to the footplate.  I had already single yellow lining that I’d purchased in France for another of my kit built locos. 
For the double lining on the boiler – and also the cylinders, I resorted to the double lining for British Rail maroon coaches, which spaced the lines correctly but was black between them.  I don’t know if it’s correct but it looks smart. 
All the lining was decal type and since all my paintwork was matt finish, I used Decalfix to apply them, applying a coat to the body first, then soaking the decals, sliding the lining/lettering into place and then fixing it with another coat of Decalfix.  It did the job but left the model with a rather patchy finish. 

For the lettering and numbering, I was already part way there and had three NORD decals from an old K’s kit but a ‘cri de cœur’ to another member of the French Railways Society produced a couple more from another K’s kit – and also some 7’s for the number.  A big ‘Thank you’ to him.  There were one or two mishaps along the way but I managed to apply the number 2.673 and NORD to the splashers and tender sides – although I did have to resort to using a few other yellow SNCF numerals, which, fortunately were an exact match to the decals I already had.
I discovered at this stage that the fret of etched plates in the kit was not the correct one, although it did have a couple of makers plates for the loco.  So I used a computer to produce a front number plate and a number (112) for the ‘Cinéma’ – the Nord Railway’s unique system of showing the train number. and eventually managed to fit maker’s plates to the cab sides and between the lettering on the tender sides. 
A final spray coat of satin varnish finished the job; and I think it looks rather good.  Painting the model black would have been a lot easier, but the look on my friend Bernard’s face when he saw the finished model was all the satisfaction I needed.

And then…
On the box which contained the kit of parts for the DJH Kit, was a photograph of a completed and painted model.  When I attended the annual reunion of the French Railways Society in August 2023, one of the members had for sale a model of a De Glehn Compound.  He had come by this model from a contact at DJH, who were disposing of models they had built in their factory toto be photographed for photographic purposes.  This model was the one illustrated on the box.  I bought it.  Factory built, strictly to the instructions, it featured some of the detail I was unable to replicate on the model I built.  It wasn’t numbered or lettered and the livery is not quite correct, particularly in the shade of chocolate.  But it looks super and runs well (better than mine).  I thought it best to leave it as it was, apart from fitting a coupling at the rear of the tender. 

Both locos have run on our Tiverton Junction layout – on ‘Anything Goes’ days, of course!!!
 
[This is an edited and updated version of an article that appeared originally in the French Railways’ Society Journal in December 2017]

A picture, taken on  Bernard’s layout in 2007, shows the loco more or less as I received it ten years later, albeit with the correct tender!

The underside of the tender, showing the gear train from the motor to the two rear axles; and the original plug and socket arrangement for getting power from the pickups to the motor

Underside of the loco chassis.  The power supply wire with it’s (original) plug (right).  The other end comes through an insulated tube, through a hole in the pickup mounting block (glued over it later) and then soldered to the pickups.

Almost there.  The model lined and lettered, but for a few touch-ups, before adding brake pipes and applying the final coat of satin varnish.

 Job done!  I think I have done my friend, Bernard Bos, the justice he deserves.