Early iron-framed open wagons, 9ft wheelbase

[47137]

More thinking.

 

We can use lighting to make colours on the layout more intense or even a different hue, but we cannot emulate the effects of distance. This needs muted colours on the model. I was using muted colours for scenery nine years ago but it is taking me a while to realise I have to do it for the trains too.

 

The task is fairly easy for early colours because we will never know the true shade of the mid grey or red viewed from close up or from a distance ... so both can be acceptable.

 

- Richard.

[47137]

On 07/12/2021 at 09:16, 47137 said:

 

I have just received a kit for an ancient brake van from the Mid Wales Railway: https://sixteenmills.yolasite.com/10mm.php (the 7mm version). I will rehome this to my fictional railway in Essex.

 

The instructions explain, "The correct livery is unknown, but mid grey or maybe dark red seemed appropriate for the period".

 

So - if a railway as well-documented as the GWR is a bit hazy I don't much fancy my chances with the MWR. I have a chance of being historially correct, also not much chance of being proved wrong; and I could invent a third scheme for my railway. My decision can be what looks most pleasing :-)

 

On 07/12/2021 at 09:21, Compound2632 said:

The thing to bear in mind is that (as far as I have been able to determine) there were two pigments in use for wagon painting up to around the late 1920s / early 30s, both preferred both for their cheapness and hydrophobic properties - providing good waterproofing: white lead, which was usually mixed with a black pigment, often lamp black (soot) to produce a range of greys; and red lead - Forth Bridge colour, a warm but not bright red.

 

 

I have rewound a bit to let me mention my brake van, this got its top coat yesterday. I wanted this to be a "cool" (i.e. blue) shade of grey but it has ended up more like, well, blue using Tamiya 'Haze Gray'. For comparison the van on the left here is Halfords grey primer and the open wagon on the right is Tamiya Royal Light Gray.

 

I am pondering, do we know whether I can expect to get away with this greyish shade of blue for a 1890s setting? I actually rather like this, but if it is really 40 years too early I will have to try again.

 

Sorry I know this is nothing to do with the GWR or its wagons but it seems more sensible to post it here than to try to start a topic on "grey".

 

- Richard.

[Compound2632]

3 minutes ago, 47137 said:

I am pondering, do we know whether I can expect to get away with this greyish shade of blue for a 1890s setting? I actually rather like this, but if it is really 40 years too early I will have to try again.

 

I think that brake van grey could be close to the lilac grey used by the Brighton in Stroudley's time, but would defer to Brighton expertise.

[cctransuk]

17 minutes ago, 47137 said:

 

 

 

I have rewound a bit to let me mention my brake van, this got its top coat yesterday. I wanted this to be a "cool" (i.e. blue) shade of grey but it has ended up more like, well, blue using Tamiya 'Haze Gray'. For comparison the van on the left here is Halfords grey primer and the open wagon on the right is Tamiya Royal Light Gray.

 

I am pondering, do we know whether I can expect to get away with this greyish shade of blue for a 1890s setting? I actually rather like this, but if it is really 40 years too early I will have to try again.

 

Sorry I know this is nothing to do with the GWR or its wagons but it seems more sensible to post it here than to try to start a topic on "grey".

 

- Richard.

 

I don't know about 40 years too early but, IMHO, it's a very good rendition of BR Wagon Grey - (60 years too early).

 

CJI.

[47137]

17 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I think that brake van grey could be close to the lilac grey used by the Brighton in Stroudley's time, but would defer to Brighton expertise.

 

It is funny you say this because I have a kit for a LB&SCR machinery wagon. The instructions for this state 'lilac grey' and I felt the Tamiya 'Haze Gray', which I have used for models of 21st century steelwork, would be just right. The machinery wagon is from the 1880s, so arguably (if a bit tentatively), Haze Gray ought to suitable for the period.

 

- Richard.

[47137]

22 minutes ago, cctransuk said:

 

I don't know about 40 years too early but, IMHO, it's a very good rendition of BR Wagon Grey - (60 years too early).

 

CJI.

I agree with you ... but I have added a Dapol 5-plank wagon wagon in "BR unfitted grey" to the mix, and this looks completely different, almost like a whitish or creamy grey:

 

The light source is the same and the exposure is the same too with a slight adjustment in the image editor to allow for the greater distance from camera to subjects.

 

I am losing whatever understanding I thought I had :-)

 

- Richard.

[cctransuk]

3 hours ago, 47137 said:

I agree with you ... but I have added a Dapol 5-plank wagon wagon in "BR unfitted grey" to the mix, and this looks completely different, almost like a whitish or creamy grey:

 

The light source is the same and the exposure is the same too with a slight adjustment in the image editor to allow for the greater distance from camera to subjects.

 

I am losing whatever understanding I thought I had :-)

 

- Richard.

 

No - it's Dapol; they just don't care about livery authenticity, I'm afraid.

 

C J I.

[47137]

I have removed the Dapol wagon from the mix, added my red wagon (from earlier) and arranged them all on my H0 layout because it has a backscene and a lighting rig.

 

The wagons are lit by the lighting rig and the camera is on its tripod. All of the light is from the lighting rig and this is of course set up for my human eyes and it doesn't match the daylight balance of the flash:

 

The brake van (on clothes pegs) is exactly the same colour as the steelwork on the structure far left, yet to me it looks so different. Maybe this is because I have different perceptions of what these different subjects should look like? The colour balance here is about right for the clothes pegs, tree and background; and the brake van looks fair too.

 

In a closer view, the lighting is unchanged but the blue in the paint is more intrusive:

 

To recap, the colours here are Halfords grey primer (box van), Haze Gray (brake van), and Royal Light Gray (open wagon). The two underframes are Tamiya 'Dark Iron'.

 

When I paint the strapping on the brake van to resemble black, I expect my perception of the body colour will change again.

 

I am still not quite sure about the haze grey. Partly because I last saw a BR unfitted wagon in the 1970s and they were really untidy to look at. Also I think I could have applied less paint on the brake van and let the grey primer underneath have more effect.

 

Any more thoughts on this would be much appreciated.

 

- Richard.

 

Edited December 22, 2021 by 47137
Simplified.

[47137]

12 hours ago, cctransuk said:

 

No - it's Dapol; they just don't care about livery authenticity, I'm afraid.

 

C J I.

 

I actually bought this wagon to backdate its livery; the BR signwriting is quite minimal. I think it is far too pale, it is even lighter than the 'Royal Light Gray'. This wagon is really for a future project, perhaps another cake box challenge if we get one. It has opening doors, which is quite cool.

 

- Richard.

[47137]

On 21/12/2021 at 14:33, Compound2632 said:

 

I think that brake van grey could be close to the lilac grey used by the Brighton in Stroudley's time, but would defer to Brighton expertise.

 

I have had a correspondence with a mate and in his words, I can make an attempt at lilac grey by taking grey paint and adding homeopathic quantities of red. If I add too much red I will simply get lilac. I will try this for my next wagon project.

 

I made myself a colour chart using four rattle cans of "grey" on three different primers:

 

The photograph doesn't render the colours terribly accurately but it does pick up up the variations.

 

Suitably encouraged I picked up the can of Ford Polar Grey thinking it was the Revell 374 and sprayed it onto my brake van (directly over the Tamiya Haze Gray):

 

Not much different to the Dapol interpetation of BR grey really. There is a part of me which wants to despair but it will be easier to tone this down than to lighten it up. So I have now painted the ironwork. I guess I should have put a primer before the Polar Grey, and used less Polar Grey.

 

The Slaters/Coopercraft kit of a GWR four plank wagon has finally arrived. So after the brake van and after the lilac grey wagon I should be sufficiently organised to return to iron-framed wagons of the GWR :-)

 

- Richard.

[hmrspaul]

On 21/12/2021 at 18:50, cctransuk said:

 

No - it's Dapol; they just don't care about livery authenticity, I'm afraid.

 

C J I.

We are going to have to differ on this. There is no BR grey. That blue grey on the brake van is certainly a good rendition of what BR may have been aiming for but the light Dapol grey is much more what many wagons appear to have been finished in. I suspect the blue that was supposed to be part of the mix for BR grey was expensive and was either missed out or minimised - after all the paint mixing instructions give a range of weight for each ingredient so no two works are likely to have the same mix - the paint foreman will have had the final say. 

 

And that is before we get into the use of military  surplus battleship grey

Paul

[cctransuk]

15 minutes ago, hmrspaul said:

We are going to have to differ on this. There is no BR grey. That blue grey on the brake van is certainly a good rendition of what BR may have been aiming for but the light Dapol grey is much more what many wagons appear to have been finished in. I suspect the blue that was supposed to be part of the mix for BR grey was expensive and was either missed out or minimised - after all the paint mixing instructions give a range of weight for each ingredient so no two works are likely to have the same mix - the paint foreman will have had the final say. 

 

And that is before we get into the use of military  surplus battleship grey

Paul

 

Greetings Paul,

 

You are, of course, correct.

 

What I think of as BR early non-fitted freight grey is, in fact the government surplus battleship grey.

 

There is a reason for this; the nearest spotting location to home - and across the road from my secondary school - was Wigston wagon repair works; formerly a Midland Railway loco shed.

 

Consequently, the incidence of ex-works wagon paint blocking our view of passing trains was (annoyingly) frequent.

 

Wigston may have been abnormally compliant with BR specs., but I was always struck by the fact that the warships in Devonport Dockyard were a match for BR grey, as outshopped by Wigston wagon works; (family holidays were taken in Cornwall).

 

I also recall huge rakes of withdrawn timber bodied mineral wagons stored on the former Wigston - Rugby line. These most certainly were every possible shade of faded grey and unpainted wood.

 

This is reflected in my ludicrously extensive stock of wagons; recently outshopped wagons are Precision early BR grey, but the rest are a variegated spectrum of grey / grot.

 

John Isherwood.

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, cctransuk said:

the nearest spotting location to home - and across the road from my secondary school - was Wigston wagon repair works; formerly a Midland Railway loco shed.

 

I think there's a little confusion in your memory here. The Midland had both a locomotive shed - a roundhouse of the square variety - and a wagon repair shop - a long rectangular building - on its Wigston "campus". From its closure in the 1930s, the loco shed was used for wagon storage but the distinct wagon works carried on. Both can be seen here, along with the coaling stage, in 1905:

 

 

[DY 2810, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence by the National Railway Museum.]

[cctransuk]

5 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I think there's a little confusion in your memory here.

 

 

[DY 2810, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence by the National Railway Museum.]

 

My memory is of what we could see from the public side of the sleeper-built lineside fence, adjacent to the yard headshunt. (Mothers were not amused by tar-stained trouser seats if, as we did, you sat on top of the fence)!

 

I only recall one trespass into the rear of the complex; I have a mental image of a roundhouse floor plan with a central turntable well.

 

I also recall reading that the Wigston loco facilities were reopened whilst the Leicester site was rebuilt.

 

John Isherwood.

[Compound2632]

27 minutes ago, cctransuk said:

 

My memory is of what we could see from the public side of the sleeper-built lineside fence, adjacent to the yard headshunt. (Mothers were not amused by tar-stained trouser seats if, as we did, you sat on top of the fence)!

 

I only recall one trespass into the rear of the complex; I have a mental image of a roundhouse floor plan with a central turntable well.

 

I also recall reading that the Wigston loco facilities were reopened whilst the Leicester site was rebuilt.

 

John Isherwood.

 

I appreciate that the subtleties of Midland Railway architecture may not have been apparent to the short-trousered!

 

I believe you are right about the re-opening.

[47137]

4 hours ago, hmrspaul said:

We are going to have to differ on this. There is no BR grey. That blue grey on the brake van is certainly a good rendition of what BR may have been aiming for but the light Dapol grey is much more what many wagons appear to have been finished in.

 

Please, can we have any advance on "may" here? Or maybe we are constrained by my lighting for the photograph and how it appears on different screens; or indeed what we know for sure about the BR paint?

 

This is a slightly idle question as I am not modelling any BR period (yet) but it would be good to know.

 

Many thanks.

- Richard

 

[47137]

My Mid Wales brake van now has its running gear, the wheelbase is eight feet:

 

I am going to call this model 'finished' for the time being. One day I might tackle the running boards or a better roof. Or maybe some thicker hand rails. It all looks better full size than enlarged like this.

 

So - the Halfords 'Ford Polar Grey' here is paler than I would have liked but I am happier with this than the Tamiya 'Haze Gray'. The model turned out flat with no desire to rock, and is nicely free-running too.

 

The story of the prototype is quite interesting. The original Mid Wales brake was transferred to the Elan Valley reservoir scheme and became the resident engineer's saloon. The  reservoir scheme was built for the Birmingham Corporation Water Works and the Brake carried the letters BCWW. So I feel I could use it on my layout as a brake van in an early setting or indeed as the chief engineer's accomodation for a later period.

 

- Richard.