Sold October 2007 Back to Archive

I expect you bought a copy of LBSC's "Model Locomotive Building - Introducing Tich" at about the same time as I did (twelve years old, at the Model Engineer Exhibition when it was still at Wembley, father used to take me at Christmas). I read and re-read my copy, wondering how on earth you converted the four wheel castings and hornplates he'd bought me into something that looked like the drawings in the book. I looked at the finished engines featured and have often wondered since what happened to "Mrs Ruth Daltry, the well-known Rugby enthusiast" and her "Tich" with United Dairies milk tanker and "Mr F Raw of the Stockport Society at the regulator of his Tich", with an old black and white picture featuring a man driving at his club track at a time when everybody still wore a jacket and tie.

Another of the pictures featured "Mr J S Jackson of Wakefield" with his engine, featured in the "Wakefield Express" having just won an award at a local exhibition - and of Mr Jackson, we now know a little more...

"Tich", his first engine, obviously fired his imagination. Working as a motor mechanic by day, he proceeded over the years to build a string of extremely fine locomotives and traction engines, in the process becoming friends with Louis Raper, the multi-award winning professional modeller and establishing a name for excellence of his painting and lining - so much so that other models arrived at his workshop for painting over the years.

At the time of his death, the only engine remaining unfinished was his masterwork, a GWR 15xx tank locomotive built to works drawings. There is little point in describing the quantity and quality of work achieved to date, I will let the pictures tell the story. Suffice to say it is one of the finest two or three engines I have had pass through my hands, every bit as well made as John Adams' 5 inch gauge Black 5 and Frederick Robinson's 3 1/2 inch gauge version of the same engine.

The engine is about 80% complete, it is missing much of the motion work, piston valve, piston and guide bars from the right hand side. Many years in build, it has spent most of its life in the glass case shown.