Bury loco passenger gear box - making a start

The London & Birmingham Railway was powered exclusively by the distinctive bar-framed locomotives of Edward Bury. A potted history of these and further details will be found in the modelling section of this website (a work in progress) but daily, or more likely weekly progress reports on scratch building the engines will be posted here, construction of three 2-2-0 passenger locomotives is now well underway. This weekends ‘window of opportunity’ saw the gearbox sides cut from 22thou brass. Small rectangles of this were sweated together with a little solder to form pairs and the assorted holes drilled out, 2mm for the gear shafts and 1mm for cross braces in the form of 12BA bolts. I confess these are the second set of gearbox sides I have made. An hour and a half was spent last week cutting and drilling the first set only to realise that whilst all the gears meshed well and everything was in the correct place, I hadn’t really left enough extra material around the edges to be able to brace or connect the two sides sufficiently to make a rigid gearbox. Not so much a case of ‘measure twice, cut once’ but more like not thinking things through and being a little over zealous in my efforts to build a very small gearbox. After all it only has a very small space inside the firebox, however I definitely overdid it with the first set. This second set seem to answer well enough although my stock of 12BA nuts and bolts might not be enough so they’ve been added to me growing shopping list for this year’s London Festival of Railway Modelling at Alexandra Palace.