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A 7 1/4 inch gauge sit-in battery electric locomotive, scratch-built with wooden superstructure on a steel chassis. Built in 1980 by a man for whose abilities we have the greatest respect, it was for use by his sons, too young at that stage to drive their father's 7 1/4 inch gauge LNER A3.

In later years he went on to build to superb 7 1/4 inch gauge Rebuilt Royal Scot 6115 "Scots Guardsman" and BR Standard Class 8 "Morning Star" which we sold last year.

The front bogie is fitted with a mechanical brake, the rear appears to be a replacement, commercially built by Ride On Railways - it's fitted with a single 24 volt motor driving both axles through a 3:1 reduction gearbox and chains with iDrive controller.

The rear bogie has a vacuum brake cylinder and disc brake fitted - it would require the addition of a vacuum pump, reservoir and driver's brake valve to operate.

The roomy cockpit gives a comfortable driving position, the locomotive itself is powerful and - given a handful of throttle - has a surprising turn of speed! There's some video of it running outside the workshop here.

We are indebted the builder for sending a history of the engine, reproduced below.

I built this electric loco round about 1980. It was at a time when I had my 7 1/4 Flying Scotsman and two young sons, later to become three. We were also fairly hard up in those days (big mortgage and interest rates nudging 15, yes 15,%) and so the electric loco was built mainly for the boys to drive on my portable track as they were way too young for driving live steam. Hence it was very much a budget job.

The main chassis was made of point rodding welded up and the motor was a 12v Atco lawn mower motor scrounged from a somewhere. The body was plywood and the roof sections I got rolled at work.

It was loosely based on a Hymek with, of course just a single cab mainly as it was meant to a be Class 20 to start with but I later decided that it would be safer to have the driver fully enclosed, as it were! Hence a mid -build change of direction.

The gearing came from a mate who was into Alvis cars and had several and he gave me the gears in payment for towing his latest Alvis home as I had a towbar on my car and he didn't. The wheels came from Twycross Zoo when they converted their railway from 7 1/4 to 12 1/4" and their Cromar White sit-astride coach bodies were too narrow to accommodate the wider bogies - I ended up buying all three of their coaches for a total of £10, kept two for fetes and sold the third for £15! Somehow there were far more wheels than I needed and the surplus therefore became the trigger for building the electric engine.

As now, only the rear bogie was powered with, wait for it, a carbon pile controller as high power transistors were not available at a reasonable price in those days and the modern controllers didn't exist.

Both bogies were similar in general design with the front one having a very simple handbrake, though popping it reverse was a good way of stopping! The front of the cab roof was a challenge and so it boasts a nice piece of wood carefully fashioned to look sort of like a Hymek. The 1A16 was the reporting number for Flying Scotsman (the train) in those days though I doubt a Hymek ever pulled such an illustrious service.

So it was that electric loco came out as the star attraction at the children's birthday parties and was even pressed into service for the occasional school fete, including one of our works open days when several hundred employees children had rides.