Another New Arrival on the Model Railway

Another recent locomotive acquisition.  This is an ex-Southern Railway Q1 class freight locomotive.  Locos designed purely for freight work were a rarity on the Southern, which was mainly a passenger carrying company, so tended to prefer mixed traffic locomotives.  The Q1, logically, followed the earlier Q class which, like the later loco, was an 0-6-0 design, but of much more conventional construction and appearance.  The Q1 was designed and built during wartime, with its design intended to use less metal than conventional designs and facilitate easier maintenance by removing such things as running plates and wheel splashers.  

The model itself, which I obtained from an online retailer, is constructed from a white metal kit by an unknown builder.  It has actually been completed to a pretty high standard and given some very effective light weathering.  It is also a very good runner, which isn't always the case with a kit-built chassis.  Whilst the model itself gives no clue as to the manufacturer of the kit, Wills Finecast (now South Eastern Finecast) produced a white metal kit and I at first suspected that it was one of these.  Close examination of the chassis, however, revealed it to be a K's kit, the use of the 'keyhole' method for inserting the axles being the giveaway.  As far as I'm aware, K's were the only kit manufacturer to use this method, (which involves the axles being inserted into the frames via the open narrow end of a keyhole shaped opening then held in place by the bearings, which fit into the wider, circular, upper part of the 'keyhole'), although Hornby used a similar system on some of its eighties models (albeit with arch shaped openings and the bearings and axels held in place by a plastic keeper plate screwed to the chassis underside).

Anyway, it's a very nice model, more robust than the ready-to-run Hornby version, not to mention significantly cheaper.  It's a prototype I didn't already have a model of and fills a gap in my locomotive roster.  I look forward to running it in properly once I've finally sorted out the renovation and expansion of my layout.