It's about time I posted some stuff I've actually done, rather than grumbling that I've not got much done. These wagons were done in September , but I've not got round to posting them till now. A mixed bag of elderly wagons on their last legs...

Exhibit A , as they say in court, is a down at heel Walrus, unaccompanied by a Carpenter:

I have to confess that I've tweaked the photo very slightly in Microsoft Digital Image 2006, to compensate for the effects of flash , though the adjustments to colour balance and contrast

are only a couple of notches. I feel a bit guilty but the contrast/border between different weathering washes always seems to leap out and hit you on a photo in a way that it doesn't viewed in natural light by the eye. Here the jarring note is the boundary between the track dirt on the wagon (Railmatch brake dirt/track dirt mix) and the general browny muck on the sides

(wash Precision LNER coach teak - I'm not likely to paint many LNER coaches, and somehow I've ended up with two tins...) It's quite subtle viewed with the naked eye, and I'm fairly pleased with the overall result. This wagon has finished up much better than I'd dared to hope at one time. It's now been fitted with Kadees - I'd no hope of getting S+W couplings under those platforms. - and is destined for the early period (1985-90) engineers train on Blacklade. The SReg off-loaded them on an unsuspecting LMR at the start of the 80s. Not sure I'm up for building another of these though...

Next in this collection of clapped out opens is a Cambrian coke wagon, a kit of very elderly vintage bought off the club second hand stall.

I discarded the moulding for the underframe members after using it to set up the solebars - I want to put lead sheet under the floor, not stick a large injection moulded obstacle in the way. Construction is very conventional, and much as it comes. Painting and weathering is according to the recipes given by craigwelsh in his MRJ article, using Games Design Workshop -although I'm certainly not in his league I'm very pleased with the result. This type of wagon with the coke raves is a pig to get into all the nooks and crannies and the photo really shows any spots I missed. I think I've got most of them since then. Transfers are Modelmasters

Next come two LMS opens:

The first, bought at St Albans last year, started off looking like this :

and now looks like this - a D1892 open retrofitted with vacuum brakes by BR

once again any imperfections are cruelly exposed by the enlargement, such as the tie rod... A glass fibre pencil was used to cut back the weathering, and transfers are a patchwork of Modelmaster bits to give a plausible seeming number

Finally there's a more or less as-it-came-in-the-packet Cambrian kit for the wooden chassis D1666, possibly the most numerous open wagon ever built in Britain and arguably second only to the 1/108 16T mineral as the most numerous wagon diagram ever

Much of the effort has gone into an attempt to represent an unfitted wagon showing the remains of late 1930s LMS bauxite, which is a bit more washed out than the photo shows - again the greater contrast under flash is a factor . I've either missed the base of the hook , or the thing's come out and been glued back in...