It's been a while since I added to this blog, but it is time to report on some progress. I mentioned in an earlier entry that I had made a master for resin casting of one of the War Department wagons used at Deptford and later sold to the Sand Hutton Light Railway. A drawing by Roy Link of one of these wagons appears in K.E. Hartley's booklet on Sand Hutton, and the same drawing was also published in Link's Narrow Gauge and Industrial magazine. Roy Link's drawings were always good quality so a 1:32 model in Plastikard was quite achievable.

And there it remained until I did a demonstration of resin casting one night at the club (Horsham Model Railway Club). That pushed me to making the mould from RTV and producing a number of castings as part of the demo. That demo was reported on the club's Facebook page and I reproduce one of the photos taken here.

Another thing that pushed me along a little was that I had obtained some 14mm diameter 00 gauge coach wheels from another club member and they proved simple to re-gauge for 14mm gauge. I have to admit though that the wagon castings sat on a shelf for most of 2022 until I was looking for a small project to use as a break from the work on the main layout. At that point I took them down to the shed and started painting.

I felt that industrial wagons need to be quite heavily weathered so the first step was to paint the wagon bodies a bare wood colour. Overpainting with a slightly darker colour achieved a bit of a grain effect after which the inside was treated to a bit of light sanding and a wash of the darker colour run over it to give a bit of a distressed effect. The outside was then given a basic grey colour. When that was dry, really dry, small streaks of paint stripper were applied with a fine brush. The effect was to lift the grey paint to look like it was peeling. Memo to self: use acrylics for the wood effect next time. Fortunately the dark yellow colour of the underlying resin meant that losing my carefully mixed wood colour as well as the grey wasn't a complete disaster.

Vigorous application of a glass fibre brush completed the old paint work effect.

The iron work was first painted a rust colour and then, when that was dry, a weathered black colour was dry brushed over. This works quite nicely to give the effect of ironwork which is rusting but still has a lot of the original paint on.

Lettering and numbering was then required. I don't have a printer that prints white ink and nor did I want to go to an outside supplier of transfers as I didn't think that would be cost effective. Instead I used the Silhouette cutter to cut out letters and numbers from white transfer film. These were then applied as if they were transfers. I had tried this technique in 3mm scale and found it a bit fiddly. The Thai alphabet didn't help either. However in 1:32 scale and nice bold letters this technique works beautifully.

The wagons still require final weathering and at the time of the photographs the dumb buffers hadn't had the weathered black dry brushed over them but I think the overall effect of these wagons is pretty good.