by Phil Sixsmith

In my humble opinion, a loco in motion must have at least one figure on the footplate. When it came to my Taliesin, it was reasonably easy to fit one man in the cab, albeit with a little surgery to one arm to avoid the radio control rod on the regulator. On my line the direction of travel resulted in me not being able to see my new crew member, nor the water gauge for that matter and all that was on view was the gas regulator knob and assorted plumbing.

I know there are those of you out there who could rearrange these essentials to be less obvious but my modeling solution was to try and disguise the offending fittings with another crew member.

This would however require some drastic surgery to the selected figure, but I think the results may be of interest. As always a few photos can illustrate far better than several paragraphs, so here they are:



This is, as I'm sure you recognize one of the Brandbright figures, with limbs removed to make him fit and a circular magnet implanted under his armpit - combined with a steel washer araldited to the gas regulator knob, holds our brave crewman in place.