Original page created on 27/09/2023.
Aesthetic improvements
I’m going to install:
- a folded bellows at the lit end;
- electric heating jumpers.
Installing a folded bellows
Exchanging the bellows is quick, as they are not glued. The problem comes with the gangway platform, which has to be removed from the unfolded bellows to be installed on the other one. To extract it or put it back on, you have to deform it quite brutally. As it is, it’s almost impossible to put it back in place. I had to enlarge the holes to ⌀ 0.9 mm to achieve this. Clearly, we won’t be able to do this every time we change bellows. So we’ll just have to leave the gangway plate permanently glued to the door (which is what I did at the beginning), or, better still, leave it attached to the folded bellows (thank you Renaud - Renato).
As far as the bellows holders are concerned, they are not glued and can be easily exchanged, as long as you have the Rapide Nord parts, of course.
Installation of electric heating jumpers
These jumpers also come from Rapide Nord coaches. Where to fit them, as no space was provided? Incidentally, they do appear on the van’s instruction sheet!
With regard to this instruction sheet, please note the lack of care taken with its design, as well as the photo of the strip which is that of the Romilly EPM coaches, with two switches, not three!
The choice is between leaving the lamp holder in place or fitting the jumper in its place. There’s still one small difficulty: the fixing hole is a 0.8 mm square; the jumper has a square tenon too, but 1 mm. As I didn’t want to do anything to the body, I reduced the tenon with a fine file. That’s how I broke one; fortunately, there are plenty of spare parts for the Rapide Nord, unlike this van! The lamp holder is easy to remove. This is not the case with the mid-height signal holders, whose tenons broke off and therefore remained in the body.
Mechanical aspects
Softening the roof clips
Given the difficulty of closing the roof, I filed the inside of the roof clips to soften their slope. The difficulty here is to do this without scratching the paint or damaging the edge. This way, closing the roof becomes easier.
I’ve found that it’s more efficient to do this as follows:
- engage the clips on one side of the model;
- lay the van flat on the fitted side;
- close the other side of the roof by pressing obliquely, both towards the body and towards the support.
Removing the chassis
To fit the lamps, which we’ll see later, you need to separate the body from the chassis. This is fairly easy, using plastic cards inserted between the two. Just be careful with the fragile, exposed mooring rings ①.
The chassis is trapped between small stops and small lugs ②. To remove it, you have to lever it out over the buffers, although there are no lugs at these points.
Let’s also take the opportunity to soften the clips on the bogie axles, which are extremely difficult to extract. The best way to do this is to insert a pair of tweezers between the chassis and the bogie (thank you Eric), from the front, taking care not to bend the power pickup strips. The pivoting of the bogies is a bit hard, so I bored the axle holes with a 4 mm drill. This removes virtually no material, but it does improve things.
Note: to remove the bogies, I’d thought of working from the inside, as on the Express Nord coaches, but it’s impossible at first sight, as the interior fittings, apparently glued to the chassis, prevent access.