One aspect of making Brettell Road longer is that the original fiddleyards will need to be replaced. As such the opportunity will be taken to increase their length from four feet to five which means I can increase the cassettes from three feet long to four and a half.  Any bigger than that and cassettes start to become unpractical and a bit sketchy anyway.

A four and a half feet long freight train on Brettell road.

A four coach passenger train.  When I built this originally one of the (then 3 coaches) wasn’t finished as I hadn’t detailed up the underframe yet and just swapped the bogies.  This was due to Brettell Road’s first outing coming up (Scaleforum 2018) and it never got moved from the ’roundtuit’ list since.

But when another cheap coach popped up I decided to get this little train ticked off so they were both detailed up together.  Leaving just one thing outstanding…

…the brake pipes.  I admit to not using working ones on my wagons, as the layout is principally a shunting one,  but as this is a fixed rake of coaches why not?  I came up with the original idea for this back around 2005 and articles appeared in update and MRJ.  The original update article can be downloaded from here.  Where  I have differed from my original article is to have one long pipe for the vac pipe and another long pipe for the steam heat pipe I figured 4 short pipes would just stick together in a clump!  So theres a magnet on the end of the pipe that connects to a magnet in the bufferbeam.  All simple stuff really but it does mean that the coaches and their pipes have to be couple up or the pipe will drag on the track and no doubt get stuck!