Aladdin

Between July 1952 and November 1954, The Model Railway Constructor published a series constructional articles which describe a live steam O-gauge tank engine. The author, under the pseudonym '1121', called the engine Aladdin, because it is fired by a meths lamp. The model is based on the GWR 1400 class (photograph above, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

The articles are notable for the very high level of detail given concerning machining operations, tool setting and so on; the series really is aimed at the beginning metal worker rather the experienced model engineer. Live steam builders in Gauge 0 or Gauge 1 will recognise the techniques used here.

Ian Allan Ltd took over publishing the Model Railway Constructor around 1960 and the magazine continued until 1987. They own the copyright, but have very kindly agreed to allow me to publish these scans. I have passed the original images through an Optical Character Recognition system to that they become text searchable.

I'd like to thank Alan England and Bob Boorman for lending me the original magazines.

The articles

I found twenty constructional articles and one submission from a K S Terry who was a builder. Below, I've provided a large PDF with all the material in one place as well as the original separate article scans.

If you have any extra information about this design, and in particular if you know of a constructed example, I would really like to hear from you, so please email me at a.johnstone@rhul.ac.uk