P & D Marsh

P & D Marsh make locomotive bodies, a few wagon bodies and a lot of detailing items, almost exclusively in cast white metal.

P & D Marsh Model Railways
The Stables, Wakes End Farm,
Eversholt, Milton Keynes. MK17 9EA
England

Phone from within the UK: 0525 280068 *
Phone from outside UK: +44 525 280068

* This is an old catalogue, and I suspect the number is now 01525, but I haven’t tried it.

P & D Marsh sell an A4-sized catalogue of their N scale product line, available from mail order shops for a little over a pound. I don’t know what the print quality is like. I ordered a copy from the Cheltenham Model Centre, but they sent me a rather poor photocopy of the catalogue rather than the real thing, which I found a little annoying. There are, however, black and white photos of all of their models, which is very useful.

I haven’t bought many of their products, but they seem to be typical white-metal castings. You can’t get the sort of crisp detailing in white metal that you can with injection-moulded plastic, and white metal is a fairly fragile material, so their detailing items tend to be a little oversized. Items are thickened somewhat, simply because you can’t make them prototypical thinness. I did notice, however, some rather prominent mould lines on the models I have, (removable through filing) and a few components where the two halves of the mould were offset significantly (not fixable through filing).

They do have a very wide range of products. Their locomotive shells are mainly of Great Western prototypes, and designed to fit Graham Farish chassis. They make footbridges, station lamps, station details, water cranes, fences, figures, common British lorries and buses of the 40s, 50s and 60s, signals, and so on. Note that many of their vehicles are cast as solid lumps, which leads to very unrealistic looking windows. But again, this is mainly owing to the physical limitations of white metal casting.

Because we live in an absurdly litigious world, please note the following. First, I have no personal financial interest in any companies mentioned here, one way or the other. Second, all trademarked names are owned by their respective owners and are mentioned here purely for identification purposes. Third, no guarantees, express or implied, are made regarding the accuracy, fitness, whatever the hell about any of the information or opinion presented here. And finally, much of this is opinion of the author; nothing more.

Text copyright © 1997 tela design.