About Palatine Models

Palatine Models was started a few years ago specifically to produce small but useful items that were needed for the building of the Manchester Model Railway Society's 18.83mm (P4) layout Slattocks Junction.

The initial reason for starting was to produce a wagon baseplate that could be used to make a batch of RCH mineral wagons for the layout and it was thought that given suitable tools and techniques we could produce the etches ourselves.

When the AJ book from the Scalefour Society was released we looked at the Alex Jackson market and started the development of the range of jigs. The book was written before our jigs appeared but if you visit the MMRS website you can see that the AJ page shows the use of the jigs to help make and use the couplings easily using everything that we can supply.

One of our members has been trying to improve the running of his vast range of LMS coaches which has led to the development of a twin torsion bar bogie which is considerably more robust than a single torsion bar idea and less likely to fracture at the solder joint. It has been tested extensively on a continuous circuit layout with 3ft 6ins curves and rides beautifully.

With a large fleet of coaches required for Slattocks an accurate and quick to build LMS underframe was developed which is available in a 57ft and 60ft underframe. Nothing hybrid for us, it has to be exactly right and it has the rivets on the solebars too. Measurements were taken from LMS works drawings held at York Museum to ensure that we were able to get as many things right as we could. You only do this once so why not try to get it right first time?

New items? Well this really depends upon what we need for our layout. We are not in this to spend all out time filling packets with bits but simply to share what we have developed and built ourselves with others who might find them helpful to their modelling too. The emphasis here is and built. We make every test etch ourselves and if changes need making we do make them.

We hope you find our products useful and if you have any ideas about improving them please get in touch.

Enjoy your modelling.