A PO wagon with a difference, in two ways: the livery is fictional, and it wasn't built by me, but by my father, Bill.
The underframe is Slaters, and the body is scratch-built in plasticard. The lettering is hand-painted using - if I remember correctly - Humbrol enamels.
Dad spent most of his career as an airline navigator, flying long-haul, which meant he would often be away for a week or more. In the early days he enjoyed seeing the many places he flew to and socialising with the rest of the air crew, but latterly he took to putting a small kit of paints, brushes, thinners and wagon sides into his flight bag, along with the maps, scale rulers, protractors and other tools of his pre-digital trade. He would sit in his hotel room and letter wagons. Over time he developed a technique of mixing rub-down lettering - made for the graphic design industry by Letraset - with hand painting. The rubdown letters helped set the overall shapes and define the straight lines, while the hand painting ensured a paint-texture finish, and adjusted the subtleties of the letter-shapes to be those of the sign-writer, not the typographer. He always said the letter S was the hardest to get right - "it looks like a meat hook" he would complain, before getting the brushes out for further adjustments.
To start with, he worked in OO, and built up a train of 100 coal wagons - mostly PO with a GWR loco coal or two - inspired by the long mineral train at Pendon. Later, he moved to modelling in O gauge, and again PO wagons and their liveries were his great interest.
Towards the end of his life, he and my mum downsized into a small flat, and he sold off most of his stock (he never built a layout of his own, preferring to contribute to club layouts at the REC in Farnborough). He kept a few things, though, which have since come to me, including this wagon - his signature piece. That's me - the "& Son".
Nick.
Postscript
I have just a few photos of Dad's other wagons, which I took on black and white film at a time when I was doing my own film processing. Some show the OO wagons, and some O gauge. The OO ones were often made with plywood sides and ends, and strapping made from toothpaste tube - in the days when such tubes were made of a soft metal, ideal for punching bolt heads into and cutting into strips. The O gauge wagons were mostly Slaters kits, sometimes 3H.
It's hard for me to be objective, of course, but I think I can fairly say that the lettering on Dad's PO wagons was as good as as any - I have occasionally seen work as good, but never better. They were truly a labour of love on his part.
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