Here are some illustrated notes from experiments with brick- and mortar-colouring for my 4mm scale station building. Please note that these are just my own bumbling exercises. There are no silver bullets here.
Method 1: Flood & Wait
So far, my standard method has been the well-known "flooding" method. I paint the brick sheets dark red (Vallejo 70.814 Burnt Red)…
… then when dry flood the sheet with a milky white wash (Vallejo
Here’s an update on Farthing’s main station building, modelled on the 1910 prototype at Newbury (see this post for details). This post summarizes work on the walls and gables. There have been other developments, will update on those later.
Although the structure at Newbury is still with us there have been numerous detail changes over the years. Above is a selection of those I have spotted. Most changes appear to have been made after the station was built, so I’m going wit
A weighbridge has appeared at Farthing. It began as a kit, but in the end much of it was scratchbuilt. Here's a summary of the build.
This was the point of departure, a lasercut kit from Rail Model. A little research showed that it is based on the prototype at Leckhampton, a drawing of which appears in the EricPlans volume on GWR and LMS structures.
The kit is nicely cut, but I noticed that the corners weren’t mitred. So I sought to
I have a thing for GWR stable blocks. The subject isn't systematically covered in the literature, so in a previous post I tried to obtain a tentative overview of the major types and styles. Since then I’ve been searching Britain from Above, Google street view and old online maps looking for past and present traces of stable blocks. It's all a bit esoteric, but for what it's worth here is a selection of my favourite 'finds'.
Westbury
It's 1929 and a pl
The following are my notes on GWR stable blocks – a subject that does not seem to have received much attention. I am about to build one for Farthing, and have noticed various style differences that may be of interest to others.
Chipping Norton stables in 1983. Built 1904. Rebuilt with end doors to serve as a garage, but otherwise it features the main elements of the "archetype" standard design, ie "hit and miss" vents in windows and above doors, and those characteristic boxy roof ve
I’ve scratchbuilt some more buildings for Farthing.
First up is this small goods shed, adapted from a prototype built by Eassie & Co. at Speech House Road station on the Severn & Wye. The contractors Eassie & Co. had an interesting history, nicely described in this PDF file by the GSIA.
The prototype had a brick base, but I decided on a timber base and a few other detail changes to suit my tastes. The roof is
Forget glacial progress, this is more like continental drift. After a good start, work on The depot has been all but stalled since spring. But with working hours beginning to look more reasonable again, I took the plunge and dug out the layout in the basement today. See if you can spot the layout in the photo above! Funny how I can spend days working on some minute detail of a layout - only to abandon the whole thing for months afterwards in a remote corner of the basement. But that's the nice t
Following concerns over the slipping time schedule, an inspector was recently despatched from Paddington to review progress of the new goods depot at Farthing station.
The inspector in conversation with the responsible engineer and builder's foreman. Despite the delays it would appear that some progress has been made on the main structure. That said, this is really just a dry run - little of what is seen here is actually fixed in place.
The roof structure for the "The depot" has been underway for some time as I've been busy with other things, but it is now nearing completion (sketches of the goods depot can be found here). My original idea was for a large single span roof, but after ploughing through photos and obtaining some sound advice from fellow RMwebbers (thanks everyone!). I decided on multiple lesser spans instead, of which two are visible on the layout.
The structure is built from
In keeping with my happy-go-lucky approach, the buildings and structures for "The bay" were kit-bashed, scratch-built or otherwise put together using whatever materials, kits and parts I came across (you realize of course that this so-called "approach" is really just an excuse for my limited modelling skills). The parcels & cloak room seen above is loosely based on the wonderful wooden building style so typical of Didcot station. This was done by scoring the cut-to-shape plasticard sides and
