It is always nice to actually finish something or, in this case, a couple of things which complement one another. In this instance, a long-term project and a quickie. The long-time workbench resident is this little Fowler diesel from the - long unavailable (move along, move along) - Impetus kit which, despite some idiosyncrasies of design which don't really wash these days - whitemetal flycranks anyone? - makes into a nice machine. The full-ish details of its progression to finished model can be found here in the UK Standard Gauge Industrial zone for those of you who, like me, sometimes manage to miss things. I hope you like it.

Weathering, in case you are interested, was mostly achieved with washes of enamels. A mix of mid grey and matt white with lots of thinners brushed on and wiped away, with more thinners to remove the inevitable tide lines. What I was aiming for, and think I've managed, is to replicate the slightly blotchy fading typical of industrial locomotives stored outside in all weathers. This was followed up with some washes of metalcote gunmetal with varying quantities of matt 82 and matt 100 depending on whether I was after rust, or oil, or diesel spills. No airbrush involved, except for the basic colours.

This loco' is part of my very long-term and spectacularly ill-defined ideas about actually building some sort of industrial railway in EM. Mostly, these ideas serve as a tenuous excuse to build some of the rather nice kits for venerable wagons available from the trade. The most recent of these is this ex-GWR china clay open, referred to in an earlier blog. Many of these were sold off to the NCB when they were replaced with fitted vehicles by BR in the early '50s owing to their relative modernity, steel frames and recently fitted 2 shoe, either side, brakes (they were built with a Dean Churchward pattern). This is also probably why there are - relatively - so many preserved at Didcot, the Foxfield Railway, KWVR and on the Severn Valley who, as it happens, have recently re-fitted their example with the Dean Churchward gear. The finished rendition looks like this:

And finally, the first of my internal users, a Cambrian Gloucester 5 plank exhibiting a bit of patch-painting, re-planking and peeling paint. That it retains any of its original livery at all is deeply implausible (not least because North Devon Clay only ever hired its wagons...) but I like it that way.

Adam