Last year I needed some styrene sections and as it happened the only place with stock was Hattons. Oh well. Anyway having ordered the stuff I needed I had a look at the pre-owned stuff. Just for fun, honest. Anyway I saw a Hornby generic 4 wheel NBR brake which had been dropped. The end was well bashed, buffers and couplings broken, the whole thing bent, body off. But all the bits had been put in the box and it was a tenner. Add to basket.

But why ? A lot has been said about these coaches but I didn’t want to comment until I had a chance to break one myself. Having someone else break it for me and then selling it to me for less than a third of full price seemed a good idea. So it arrived, I had a look at it, harumpfed a bit, put the bits back in the box and left it to fester.

During the last month I have made some wagons. They are at the painting stage and I want them in a bit of a faded red lead colour. My usual method for this is humbrol 100 with a spot of 61 flesh mixed in to fade it pinkish. I opened a tin of 100, it was a solid colour. Um nope,  it was just solid. So I opened my last new tin. Sludge, completely useless.

This resulted in me going through all my enamels. Out of 80 tins I threw 40 away as unusable. Of course they were all the most recent and most useful ones, some tins dating back to the 1970s were perfectly ok, if i ever go back to making kits of ww2 aircraft.

Now much has been said on rmweb about the decline of enamels and the subsequent withdrawal of many. So bite the bullet time, I shall have to learn how to paint with acrylics.

Clearly this is two pronged experiment. Mess about with a generic coach and learn a bit about acrylics. So how did it turn out ?

Perhaps I should have taken some progress pics, but I guess you will have seen similar. Anyway, chop a couple of panels out, shorten floor, weight and chassis to suit. Make proper footboards, add sprung buffers, safety chains, oil lamps, end steps, handrails, sensible door handles, lamp brackets, adjust brakes, reduce wheel flanges and adjust to my EM, chop off the huge coupling pockets and fit mag ajs and a CR number plate.

I think I can justify this under rule 2, vaguely plausible. The Caley inherited all sorts from absorbed railways. So this is a bit of stock from perhaps the Scottish central now being used as a tool /riding brake by the pw department. Any other nebulous excuses gladly accepted….