Having modified the livery and renumbered one of my Hornby 2 BILs so it represented a unit getting near the end of its life I decided that the bogies and underframe and its equipment were much too clean and shiny. In fact, this applies to all of the units, BIL, HAL, CEP, EPB and MLV! However, one at a time is the way to go, otherwise I get bogged down and lose interest again.

The techniques used on this one were simply to use thin washes. My usual colours for this are Humbrol coal black (#85), dark earth (#29) and rusty browns (#100 or #133), and sometimes a bit of leather brown (#62) as well. I have also recently acquired some of the weathering washes so have been experimenting with those too.

However, having said all that, I chose to use only a few of those for this project. For the roofs I used the Humbrol dark grey wash, which came up quite nicely. Buoyed up by the success of that, I tried the dark brown wash on the underframes and bogies. This was less successful as it dried very glossy, in spite of my having mixed and shaken the jar well.

Next was a wash of Humbrol #66 over the bogies, underframes, equipment, buffers and beams, and inner ends. I also did a very thin wash of the same along the lower body edges, up to the side waist mouldings and jumper socket level on the yellow ends.

After that was a thin wash of a colour I hadn't used for weathering before, a Revell dark reddish brown #84. Again this was done over all the same areas that had had the grey (except the previously done roofs). I also used this colour in less thinned form for the brake blocks and brake rigging. Again I applied a very thin, tapered wash up the lower sides to the waist moulding, thinning the colour right down to almost non-existence at the waist mouldings.

The effect is quite good and I am not inclined to do too much more to this one. I did apply slightly thicker grey #66 to the step boards under the doors to emulate where people's shoes scuff them.

The trick with all these washes is to build up the colour in layers, rather than applying it all at once.

I noticed that the driving motor coach body was not properly seated at the inner end and fixed that up after these photos were taken.