The Wonder - Stage Coach Vignette

Where there’s a will there’s a way. From the start I hoped that the Wonder could have working lamps. I waxed and waned over this throughout the build depending on how well things were going and how ambitious I felt.

My initial trials casting tiny LEDs inside clear resin were unsatisfactory. To be fair the resin I used was past its shelf life and remained soft which was then difficult to clean up and paint. At that point I decided to just fit non-working lamps and chose an etched brass kit from Shire Scenes by Dart Castings. It’s a neat but fiddly kit of what looks to be a Mail Coach lamp so a little modification was necessary. After assembling the body I drilled out the lense hole and soldered on the large bezel, then drilled vertically up through the body to solder in a length of 0.7mm brass wire. It was at this point I felt brave enough to drill a hole in one side and insert a drill through the front and drill away the section of brass wire inside the body. It was a risky and delicate operation but to my delight it worked first time on both lamps. The secret was having used solder for assembly as it filled the tiny corners providing a much stronger body than if it had been glued.

A tiny warm white 3v LED was dipped in Humbrol 93 buff enamel to give an oily yellow glow and once dry the wires were threaded through the hole in the front, out the side and through a hole drilled in the side of the coach. A brass wire bracket also held the stem of the lamp and gave a good strong fixing point to the coach. A larger hole was drilled through the underside of the coach to come up at the back of the seat so the wires could find their way out and down to the ground. I filed down two loco handrail knobs to create the domed lamp top and glued these in place with epoxy at the same time flooding epoxy into the bezel to form a lense and secure the LED in the correct position.

After wiring up to a 3v coin battery with a suitable resistor on the positive feed I was delighted to see both lamps light up with a lovely dim glow. It struck me that such lamps were merely to alert other road users to the presence of the coach. As for lighting the road ahead they must have been all but useless!