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Trevithick's Pen-y-Darren loco


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I was lucky enough recently to acquire an unmade Airfix kit of this loco. I decided to make the most accurate model I could, so started to research the prototype. It's early days yet but a few points have arisen already:

  1. What were the arrangements for feedwater? I presume that there must have been some means of keeping up the boiler water level but none of the illustrations I have seen show anything.
  2. The boiler appears to be of the Cornish (single firetube) type. If the kit is correct, the valve controls are at one end of the loco and the firehole door is at the other. Was there a tender at one end for the fireman and some sort of trolley at the other for the driver?
  3. Did the "fireman's" tender carry a water supply in the form of a tank or a cask (a la Rocket)?
  4. Which end would be regarded as the leading end?
  5. Was the boiler clad? I would have expected to see wood strip cladding on a boiler of the period but again, none appears in the illustrations I have seen.

I believe that a working replica has been made. Does anyone know where it is?

Any help that can be offerred to enable my model to be accurate would be much appreciated.

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If your kit is unboxed and about 0 guage it is not Airfix but another maker. I have done the kit and also the other kit from the same maker, ROCKET. I cannot remember the maker at present but spent a good few hours making them. I bought them at Monk Bar Models York about 20 years back. I am not sure if they were Revell or not. I cannot help with the points you have as pictures of the loco are different to the way the kit assembles. A nice kit sprayed in matt black with a brown wood tender misted over in black to look old and dirty.

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@ John and @ VESPA

Thank you both for your help. The model is definitely Airfix. I may have mis-identified one feature. The boiler is return flue, the feature I took to be a firehole door is a smoke box door, so just one tender for driver and fireman. The Swansea replica appears in videos so I shall watch them carefully to see what can be gleaned.

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According to an online listing, it started off carrying Airfix product code 622, is now A05871 and is 1:32 scale. There are four examples of box art illustrated, the earliest being from 1968 and the most recent dating from 2012. The oldest states the model is battery driven and later versions appear to say it can be motorised.

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  • 11 months later...

As you may have found out by now, the Airfix kit, which I built as a working model when the kit was newly released, is NOT a model of the Pen-y-Darren loco. It is a model based on a drawing of a later loco. No drawings of the Pen-y-Darren loco exist and the loco represented by the kit was of the wrong track gauge for the Pen-y-Darren ironworks and the large flywheel and tall chimney would not have passed through a tunnel on ht eline.


The later loco represented by the kit was probably built for the nearby Tregegar ironworks which was of the correct track gauge without the problems of a low brodge or tunnel. If you want a primer on this try this video:

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@TE

I was not aware that the kit does not portray what it is stated to portray. It resembles fairly closely all the various illustrations of what is stated to be the Pen y Darren loco. Where did those illustrations originate, I wonder, and how did they become accepted as an accuate portrayal of the Pen y Darren loco? Fascinating stuff.

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