D & S brake van rebuild 1

 I threw most of a box of stock in the bin. This was all from the much maligned Froxington (which even now still gets enquires) Not my finest hour... anyway. One or two thing were put to one side, one being this D & S kit for an LNWR 10 ton brake. short and cute and ideal light railway fare. This is its best side, the other had suffered a bit from living in an ice cream tub for a decade and there was some footstep and handrail casualty. D & S kits no longer exist, but were faves of the pre-group finescale brigade. This is big chunks of w/m with etched detail, rocking W-irons are standard and it just purrs along. It's likely that I picked it up unmade off a club stand for a fiver (this is common practice). It has no natural home unless I suddenly go for another pre-groupy light railway project. I did ponder this for a while and have a suitable back story and geo-placing. I also pondered a repaint into S. Region colours for Dury's Gap. It has slight LSWR overtones and I'll bet only those fully qualified with a ' finescale ethos' would notice. Ideas?
The real thing looked like this and most if not all were gone by early LMS days though I have unimportant questions here.

The damage was assessed as a broken footstep hanger, some drift in the fitting of these and a broken hand rail joint.

The handrail was a quick fix with a dab of the soldering iron. The steps were more of a fiddle. Plus if you compare photos 1 &2 you'll notice that the hangers are too long; the step should dangle over the axleboxes not below them. No sure why I did this as it's a single etched piece so should be right, but obviously isn't. 

The answer was to weld the broken hanger back in place and shorten all four with the danger of snapping them.