I've been looking forward to this for ages - the little yellow blobs have been sitting on one board or another for quite some time awaiting my largesse. Today they got it:
Having got the left end of the layout to the right kind of state at the weekend, involving lots of sensible risk-addressing (doing the most sucky and/or risky things first) I thought this would make a suitable treat I stripped some fine wire and pushed/pulled the conductors out of it so that the insulation would fit over the tiger-tail peg I'd left on the lubricators. Feeling adventurous, I used a single strand of pre-tinned conductor as the hose clip, twisted around with tweezers and secured with superglue.
Installing the lubricators was pretty easy - the Klear-fixed ballast isn't hard to shift if you need to and I made a couple of divots, added two drops of superglue and held them in place for 10 seconds. After that had gone off I brushed the loose ballast back around them to bed them in and set it with more (thin) superglue. Then the fun bit - detail painting! I'd already painted the bodies with GW Iyanden Darksun and Sunburst Yellow. Then they got a wash of Devlan Mud, most of which I wiped off since the ones at Whitemoor are pretty clean. I drybrushed some false highlights with a bit of off-white, and touched in the nipple and nuts (oo-er ) with Tamiya Flat Aluminium.
I tried to keep the weathering pretty restrained - the examples at Whitemoor don't seem to get as foul as the one at Water Orton which Pete Harvey and Eldavo were kind enough to provide some close-up pics of - it was quite unpleasant, with white goop everywhere. I contented myself with some more Devlan Mud along the rail side, Flat Aluminium for the grease blades and pump gubbins, and then drybrushed the latter with Vallejo Brown Leather, which is my "track dirt" colour, to blend it in. The only remaining job was to paint in the sleeper numbers and arrows following a handy Geoff Tibble prototype picture (click Full Size to see them). Thankfully these are only on one of the lubricators at the entrance to the yard, as far as I can tell. These were done with thinned GW Skull White and a size 000 brush, then drybrushed over with more of the brown leather to tone them down. They aren't super-neat, but the white paint is more hardwearing than the white gel pen I have, so it seemed like a better bet here.
Quite a quick project, at least in terms of work hours rather than elapsed time, but very satisfying
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