I'll be honest, I've made absolutely no progress with Blanche - I can't face filing a coupling rod from scratch just yet, and I'm seriously considering making Pete and Jen at Backwoods believe that I should never be let near etched metal with a soldering iron ever again... and they may be right.

I've not been completely idle however: the new goods stock has been primed ready for painting, and some airbrushing of the two scratch-aid bogie carriages has started... though one needs a respray and the one in decent nick (No. 12, below) is in need of some touching up. Not bad, I reckon though, for a first attempt at airbrushing and with canned air and a Model Rail subscription gift airbrush at that! Criticism, advice and tips are, of course, welcome

It's painted in various Precision colours; the green and ivory 1950s livery being based on LNER tourist stock, those are the colours recommended in the range to provide a good representation of the livery. The green looks about right to me, but having used the cream before on the Victorian vehicles it seemed a little too yellow to me, and so I experimented: I made up a matching card with increasing proportions of white mixed into the cream and made use of a variety of colour photos that I have in my FR library (to allow for differences in lighting and film quality). What I arrived at was a mixture of 3:1 white:cream, as I found that most of the photos had it looking white rather than cream, but... Oh well, I'm reasonably happy with the appearance, though I await with bated breath for someone to shoot me down

The ends are to be red oxide, and I've been told that P630 is the way forward... but I can't find it anywhere on the Precision website! I ordered a tin proclaiming 'red oxide' from the interweb along with the rest of my bits and bobs, but it seems to be more maroon than red oxide! What I may try is BR freight stock bauxite, unless anyone has any better ideas?

Transfers will need to be ordered for it, along with a job lot of other FR stock at the same time, methinks. Now, onwards to respraying No. 11!