Modify MK1 open coaches to corridor (Alan Marsden's anyway)

[Bruce_L]

This topic is to explain how I did this as I wanted more corridor stock and less open's. This was done on a Marsden open Mk1 and the method might be extendable to other similar coaches.

I planned to write up a description for the Newsletter, but there's little space in that for nearly a year so this is a reduced introduction for those who read this Forum.
There will be several sections to this, but all under the same title.
Bruce

[Bruce_L]

Here is the motivation for this project:
My recollection of railway coaches from my young life and teens was almost always of corridor stock behind steam or diesel when we went on holiday, then later travelling weekly in the 70’s from Huddersfield to Leeds for my Saturday job (in a Model Railway shop!). After a while, TransPennine DMU’s took over on the Leeds route. These were really my first experience of travelling in open carriages. I didn’t like them in comparison to corridor/ compartment stock. {Note that I did like the TransPennine styling, and still do – a good project!}

It was some 40 years later that I acquired a short rake of Alan Marsden G3 Mk1’s to add to my developing garden railway stock. To me these coaches are much better than the Kingscale’s. One of the Marsden’s was a BK which was half-corridor’d of course; the other three were open.I found that I still disliked the open arrangement. It’s surprising how much your youth affects things in later life! I wondered if I could modify at least one of the opens to give me a further corridor coach.
This wasn't as easy I thought it might be!

[Bruce_L]

I found that the Marsden Coaches are very well put together and better than Kingscale I think. It does make it difficult to modify, though as it's generally 1mm brass riveted so changing things would be like starting again. I needed an add-on module to do the job.  I’d already decided that I wanted plenty of passengers on board them all so I’d tried to fit lots. It was frustrating that even small people could not get their legs between the seats and the tables. Lots of head scratching, then: Eureka! Experimenting with little people I realised that (a) there are no central tables in compartments and (b) the dimensions of a gangway with seats at each side is just about the same as pushing the seats together with a corridor at one side. Maybe it WAS possible!

[Bruce_L]

Obviously, there's lots of MK1 diagrams and I needed one that was with the same window and door positions. I decided that Diagram146/147 would suffice. This has some different interior bits but the outside positions for everything, including the toilet windows, is the same (close enough anyway). No doubt, someone will disagree with this!

At this point I decided that I might want to revert to the original coach, with the open arrangement. For this reason I decided to make the modification reversible.

I achieved this and I'll explain how this was done and also describe the module required to create the corridor arrangement either later-on here, or in the Newsletter. There's also the possibility that others might to modify their coaches, so I could provide the module parts to make the same change. I'll also add some photos.

[Bruce_L]

MK1 open with passengers:




Same coach but with corridor:




And a module in place, another above and behind is the BK for comparison: