Modeling the Prince: Part 1

In progress, the icon of the Ffestiniog Railway, The Prince! All of the body work is completed. I am going to try and describe his construction as I did with Rheneas, this blog's signature series of posts, all made possible by the grace and kindness of Greg Tiernan and Nitrogen Studios. 

Prince will be the main engine or character that will be taking the slate train from the quarry inclines to the harbor. As I have loved the Mid Sodor Railway, This line that belonged to Duck, Stuart and Falcon had inspired me to make a animation short of something real, showing the workings of a quarry, the railway and its engines that work there. Prince is famous and a well recognized engine as one of the oldest surviving roster of engines of this historic line, technically the first narrow gauge railroad in the world.

Prince and his railway will always be remembered and loved, and I hope that the fruit of all of the hard work I will put into this faithfully represents essence of the magic felt seeing these trains, the little toy trains of Wales working in the mountains of Snowdonia.

Drawing in graphite using a 0.7 technical pencil, measurements in centimeters, 16mm scale.

Prince's sister engine, Princess, at the Harbor Station at Blaenau in 1930, (www.festrail.co.uk)

While studying some amazing photographs found online, I wanted to make Prince exactly how he and his brothers and sisters on the Ffestiniog railway looked, from the 1900's until before World War II. I drew the sketch I shared from one of the previous posts to measure how I want Prince to look when he is made, with a side view and a front view. 
This is amazing because I really love drawing these blueprints, and I find that it pays off to measure out the shapes ahead of time. I am actually making a lot of these, for Rusty, Duncan, Peter Sam, and my buildings made from the past few months.

The cab, tanks, tender, and their details such as hand rails, are all made of card, braced with balsa wood, all glued together using white glue and crazy glue, with some scotch tape here and there! The tape was used to brace the tank and the smoke box together.

I use a Lego chassis to make each engine move, which allows each engine have interchangeable bodies when I want to make more engines, as I have two of these cool Lego motors!

I am planning on adding working coupling rods, so we'll see how that works!

I used spray primer to give Prince his color. First I was going to pick a color from my stack of textured card stock from Bazzill Basics, or paint it using Plaid Folk Art and Apple Barrel acrylics, but after using my spray paint primer, I liked the terracotta color it had, so it stuck.

The funnel is made from coiled strips of card glued together. The same technique was used to make the gold handrail supports on his tanks. The sides of the footplate is balsa, the bolts and details made by gluing strips of card together. When fully assembles this will be generously weathered for that extra bit of realism.

Here is the tender. Here the handrails are made from painted toothpicks!

To make the Lego wheels fit snugly underneath the chassis, I used balsa wood to brace them.

Here is the inside of the tender, which will be filled with coal later.

I am very happy with how good Prince looks. He has always been one of my favorite narrow gauge engines, and it feels wonderful to make him after practicing and using some new modeling techniques.

So far things are going on schedule. More photographs will follow soon.