It was my bad fortune to be born too late to see trams in my native London , however , I always had a fascination for electrically powered road and rail vehicles . Whether it was seeing a solitary London tram stuffed and mounted at Chessington Zoo or my Matchbox model of a London E1 that sparked off a lifelong love ,I don't know . You can imagine ,then ,my delight as a young child to discover the VER on a family trip to Brighton in the late 1950's . Further trips to the coast revealed the Ramsgate Tunnel Railway and Claude Lane's narrow gauge trams at Eastbourne . So the die was cast . It is strange therefore , that it has taken me so long to produce a model of any of the vehicles in my formative encounters . Especially as I have been building models of one sort or another for as long as I can remember .
So why choose 16mm to the foot scale . This scale is one of the most popular for garden railways . Models usually run on 32mm gauge track and therefore represent 2' gauge prototypes . I have built several dozen models , both steam and battery powered in this size over the last ten years and a while ago it occurred to me that by using 45mm gauge track in this scale a prototype of 2' 8" gauge is almost exactly represented . The model could be built with wheels fastened to the axles by grub screws which would allow a change of gauge from 45mm to 32mm and could be run on friends railways of either gauge .
The resulting model is built to what model boat builders call stand off scale , i.e.; it looks right from around 3' away but I make no claim for detailed accuracy . As I had never seen any drawings in the model press , my first task was to produce a plan to work from . I have both Alan A Jackson's books on the railway and from these I knew my only concrete facts : a 'standard' Volk car is 24' 4" long , 6' wide and 7' 6" high . Armed with these measurements I started to deduce the other dimensions from the photo's in the books and various snaps I had taken over the years . If my model is of anything it probably represents car No.3 as seen on the front cover of the Plateway press book' Volks Railways Brighton .
My resulting drawing looked pretty good to me so a start was made on the model . As I wanted a regaugeable model I chose a set of wheels from a 16mm scale supplier , Roundhouse Models . At 32mm diameter this represented 2' some 6" less than the prototype but I was willing to accept this as they were known to be reliable runners . The motor was to be an ex-equipment Escap which is a very small but powerful motor , the one problem being it was just too long to fit between the 28mm back to back wheel measurement required for 32mm gauge track . I found a crown and pinion set from a plastic car in the scrapbox and although this would only give a reduction of 4:1 I decided to give it a try as it allowed the motor to be mounted lengthways under the body and 32mm gauge running achieved .
The side frames where cut to length from 16mm x 7mm softwood strip from the local DIY center and the ends sawn to give the characteristic narrowing . Five spacers were cut from the same material and the parts were glued to a balsa floor 385mm x 95mm . Once the front and rear dashes are added to this the overall length scales out at 24' 6" , close enough for me !
The axles where cut to length to fit inside the frames and four bearings were soldered up from scrap brass . The wheels and driven gear were assembled onto the axles and then the axle bearings were glued inside the frames , this traps the wheels and gear for evermore of course unless the glued joint is broken . I set the bearings artificially low in the frames to offset the smaller than scale wheels and also to provide reasonable ground clearance and prevent the completed model being unduly affected by leaves , twigs and the like , which infest garden railways . A small battery box was glued under the floor and connected via a DPDT switch to the motor . The chassis ,had a lively turn of speed and accelerated well despite the relatively low gear ratio .
The body was started by cutting the two saloon bulkheads from thick card . These were glued to the floor with balsa uprights at each end . The two longtitudinal bearers that were to run the full length of the car were cut from balsa strip and glued to the top of the bulkheads and the outer uprights then cut to length and glued . This formed a strong structure so my thoughts turned to how to represent the seats . The solution I came up with was to make an inverted T shape from plasticard and then add a piece of scribed , thin plasticard on each side to represent the planking . That took care of the double seats . As the bulkheads were solid card below the windows for strength , the seats on these were made in the same way , only with an L shape , and glued on either side to represent a back to back seat . The legs were cut from strips of plasticard and the seats painted chocolate brown all over .
The doors and side panels were cut from card , painted chocolate and yellow , and then glazed with thin clear plasticard . I decided to make the side doors slide so they were mounted in L section Plastistruct and small handles from brass wire were added . The two dash panels were cut from balsa sheet and a card overlay made to represent the panelling .
With all the body work painted and the seats glued in position I was left with some of the finer detail to complete . The scrollwork brackets where the uprights meet the roof were made from thin plasticard strip and the brake handles were whitemetal castings intended for detailing American box cars in this scale . The buffers are small bits of dowel caped with some small bits of rubber from the scrapbox . The handrails on the seats are my biggest disappointment and still need to be sorted out . Initially I made simple curved rails from brass wire but these have proved to be vulnerable to damage so I will have to make something more robust and a bit closer to the shape of the original .
The roof is a ready formed piece of curved plastic that only needed to be cut to length and glued in position . A few extra details such as the dash panel brackets were made from plasticard and the paintwork finally touched up .
After an initial appearance on the local 16mm scale exhibition layout , I decided to add an on/off switch under the canopy at one end , where the original Volk controller would have been .This made control easier as the reversing switch was in the saloon and difficult to reach in emergencies .
With the model a success my thoughts turned to other projects , only to return to the VER with model of No.5 , the enclosed winter saloon .
This article has previously appeard in "VOLK'S NEWS" , the journal of the Volk's Electric Railway Association . For membership details write to The Membership Secretary , 13 Rudyard Rd , Woodingdean , Brighton , BN2 6UB