I bet you'd all forgotten about this, but it's been back on the bench for some final work including droplights being painted, glazing added, and roof and ends painted. There are still a few small castings to go on the ends, as well as working bellows, and I've still yet to add the door opening handles. Then I have to devise some coupling solution which is more a case of choosing one of the several incompatible methods I use on different items of stock.

Corridor side (my favorite side, for some reason - perhaps it's the larger windows, lending a less cluttered look?)

Compartment side:

Finally I thought I'd see how it lined up against one of Hornby's very nice new 57 foot bow-ended Collett coaches.

What's readily apparent is that Hornby's chosen shade of GWR brown is very dull indeed, almost a khaki in certain lights. I wouldn't say it's in any sense wrong but it's definitely on the drab side. My experience
is that these differences, while stark when you examine two vehicles next to each other, tend to become less striking when running in a train. And of course there was a wide variation in the conditions of paint
on real coaches, perhaps even more so on the GWR which was noted for assembling very mixed rakes of stock, so you probably wouldn't want too exact a match.

Overall I'm very satisfied with this coach and look forward to adding its brake third partner in due course. Given that it's taken me more than three months to do this one, though, you'd be well advised not to hold your breath...