With a five unit rake to populate with containers, I ordered fifteen boxes from C-Rail Intermodal. Five were already painted in Freightliner livery, but the other ten were unpainted boxes in two styles, with and without advertising panels. I also ordered two identical sets of older-era decals, and have now set about painting and decal-ing the models.

At least with the decal sheets I have, there's more scope for using the boxes with panels, whereas only one of the transfer sets (that for AJCL) fits the boxes that have ribs along the whole of the side. I'll no doubt end up ordering more of the former, as well as some more pre-painted boxes, taking a reasonably relaxed rule as to what fits my very loose period.

As a kid I had the Triang Freightliner depot, which came with an extra CTI container. I'd always liked that container, so it's great that the decal sheet includes an option for CTI - in fact two per sheet, so I should be able to do four in total. I used Railfreight red for this one, French blue for the AJCL container, brick red for the TEX one, and some nondescript green for the Evergreen. The C-Rail decals do give some painting guides for the shades, but it's pretty obvious that you only need to be in the very rough ballpark given how the real things would have aged and faded as they were exposed to the elements. I've yet to fit the door locking gear.

The decals are by Microscale and are up to their usual quality. I've used them before and find them to be very good, and responding well to Micro-Sol and Micro-Set. I found I could do a whole container in about 30 - 45 minutes, with pre-painting taking an evening or two depending on the number of coats. So while it's great to have these kits, it's still fairly time-consuming when you have more than one or two to do.

Not knowing much about container styles and the evolution of company names over the years, I've been very glad to have these two books for reference:

The Collins is entirely in black and white save for the cover, but it's a gold-mine for pictures of BR-era container trains. The only drawback is that, with many of the shots typically being the usual three-quarter perspective, the details of the containers are often quite hard to make out. The Shannon is mainly colour and does have some good BR material in it, but it's understandably weighted toward the post-privatisation era.

One thing I will say that is, in many of these shots, the skeletal nature of the FFA/FGA wagons is far from obvious! From anything other than a dead side-on shot, the underframe details blend into the shadows and you can't really tell what's going on. So, while they won't satisfy the purists, I'm very happy with the impressionistic nature of these Triang-Hornby conversions, especially with the containers in place to give a bit of misdirection. On that note I've now done another pair of outer wagons, so the "rake" is now seven units long and really does start to have a bit of presence. Just need some more containers to go on it now...