As the end of the year approaches, I think there is time for me to finish off a couple more projects. The first of which will by my Jon Hall Cargowaggon Twin kit, chosen mostly because I want to ensure that I have it running for the layout’s debut in February.

So after painting the sides silver earlier in the week, the next job was to mask up for the yellow box around the Cargowaggon logo. The transfers from Railtec are just for the letters (presumably to enable them to be reused on other Cargowaggon vans that have a different spacing). The first job was to mask off the required area (remembering that the right hand half of the set has a larger yellow panel for the left). I set about painting the panel by hand with Vallejo acrylics, after testing a couple of shades I settled on Golden Yellow (which was purchased as part of the mixture for GWR cream), it actually looks a pretty good match for certain yellow warning panels.)

It took about 5 coats to get a decent colour build up (I know I’d have been better off spraying this onto white primer rather than silver.) One downside is that despite my best efforts there has been paint build up against the masking tape, which I only noticed after removing the tape (after the 5^th coat). I will have to try and rectify this before adding the transfers….

Moving on, looking at photos it appears on some wagons the top of the roof was blue and on others light grey. Given that the ECC blue roof I had previously sprayed was not the best finish I decided to go for a grey roof. So after mixing up some Vallejo grey black with some white to lighten the shade, this was all painted grey.

The final job was the underframe, again this should have been painted blue (but I forgot!) An issue if I was to run this in my late 80s period, but given I have so many Vxx + a BR ferry van and a LWB Cargowaggon for this period I have decided to finish the twin for 1998 running. This means it will be heavily weathered (eventually), but also means the underframes are all a consistent shade of muck (I have yet to see a photo in this period upon which you can see the underframe is blue!) As a result I made up a batch of my preferred underframe muck mix (roughly 50:50 Grey black / Cam brown with a little leather or sand to lighten), and painted the lot. There is a thin gap between the rib running the length of the chassis and the doors that was particularly difficult to paint (I think the primer cant have got in there and the acrylic wouldn’t take to the bare resin) but got there in the end.

Tonight its transfers and varnish, then onto the next project…

Modern stock wise this is probably the last major job for now, the layout needs a final push (including cassette building) to get it over the line, and there is a lot of work to do on Brent in the new year.