The Hachette Mark 1 has now been finished, with interior painted

And here's the results. There is a problem , but it isn't obvious:

When I was weathering the underframe somehow a touch of weathering wash got onto the sides. I cleaned it off with white spirit but the panel was still discoloured. I cleaned the whole panel back to plastic and revarnished - still a marked grey discolouration. I cleaned back and rubbed down with ultrafine gritpaper and revarnished - still clearly discoloured.

I then found that Railmatch BR maroon is noticeably darker , and rather more purple. I brightened it up with some Railmatch Royal Mail red, mixed to a good match by eye, and repainted the panel.

It's not an absolute match. In most lights you can't see a difference , and you can't see it on the photos. (It's the long panel under the 4 large windows on the left, by the way). But stick the coach under a fluorescent daylight lamp at a range of 6" and the side is pinkish and the patch is redder. And in some lights you can see a slight difference of colour between the door and adjacent panel.

If anyone had patch-repainted a panel on the real thing after it had spent a while in traffic I reckon this is exactly the effect you'd get. But I can find no photographic evidence of such local emergency patching on coaching stock - and if it had gone near a main works they'd have done a full repaint. In the 1960s there were no graffiti or "tags" - that didn't start till the early 80s.

So after feeling very pleased with how this had scrubbed up, I now feel considerably deflated with a bodged model. But I'm going to leave it "as is" for the moment because you can only see it if you know exactly what you are looking for and where to look. If I notice something when I bring it out again in a few months time having forgotten the incident - there's an issue. If I don't spot it and simply don't notice the issue when I'm not consciously looking for it - then it'll pass.

While all this was going on, I got rather alarmed about the darkness and seeming purpleness of Railmatch BR Maroon. Especially as I'd just bought a spray can of the stuff for the Porthole Brake Third. So I dug the Coopercraft Gresley Tourist Brake Third out of the cupboard, gave the back of the sides a coat of Faded Rail Red - a nice pink shade, to boost opacity and act as an undercoat to relieve an over dark maroon - then one, two coats of BR Maroon on the front, carefully touching round the windows with a small brush - and yes it does need at least 3 brush coats for opacity, like Tony Wright said...

By which time I'd concluded I was probably committed to building the thing. I know I can do a plastic coach kit...

So far I've carefully built a set of Gresley bogies, and added a Comet whitemetal ducket, because I had to buy a packet of 10 for the Porthole Brake, which only needs 2

Speaking of which, as promised here is the MTK Porthole brake kit as unpacked....