Having had a relaxing time building a wagon its time to get back to building a layout. So, next step, getting a spot of paint on that viaduct. Well, more than a spot really, it ended up at 9 foot long so no way would tiny tins or small tubes cover it all up. Musing on this I thought about tester pots. Over the years I have accumulated a boxful, picked up very cheap as last years colours and that sort of thing. Several dozen of them in fact, so I dug them out and had a play. Most were matt emulsions but I found that several coats over a general purpose primer covered the styrene sheet of the viaduct rather well. Not only that I could mix them and add pigments easily, quite a fun exercise as it turned out. So, method decided.

Then of course I began to think about colour. I had photos of the viaduct at Bowling, but of course they are 130 years after it was built. Clearly the builders were trying to make the concrete finish emulate stone, after all a prestige company like the CR ( and for that matter its shareholders) would want to see their money invested in structures that looked as if they would last like stone. Looking at period pictures it seemed to me that the strength of colour was much more solid than it appears today, but I still had to think about the shade.

Anyone who has drilled or cut into stonework will see that the colour inside the stone is very much better defined than the surface. The same is true of concrete, if you want to see what the original mix looked like you have to cut into it and see what the aggregates were and whether something was added to shift the colour. To cut a long story short that is what I did, choosing for my tests a few concrete structures long since abandoned, but known to be late 19th century. I found that the builders had done a pretty good job of recreating the deeper reds and pinkish orange hues of the sandstones used for so much of the Victorian building in the West of Scotland.

Just between ourselves I think that sometimes the modern fashion for weathering everything is a bit overplayed. Some do it in a subtle manner, its difficult to get just right. The thing is that if you are modelling pre group, and certainly pre ww1, it is clear from the available photos that things were not left to become severely weathered. Stock was cleaned, stations swept and painted, structures regularly maintained. I am depicting the viaduct barely a decade after it was built so it would still be a new build with very little deterioration in colour and almost no surface spalling. I have therefore gone for fairly solid colours, if I do any weathering in the future it will be very light.

Anyway, sorry to be a bit longwinded. Still a fair way to go, but here are some pictures of progress.