Nick Holliday

I personally would go for No 5, as I prefer the broader lettering, the narrower ones look a bit forced. In fact I would suggest even larger letters, extending across the centre of the wagon, although that would mean dealing with the ironwork, but there are examples where the lettering is kept either side of the door, as your wagons.

What you will need to include is the tare weight, load limit and a geographic location, so the wagon has a chance of getting home - Kent Coal could be anywhere in the country!

The internal woodwork, I think, was normally unpainted timber, although they may have applied some paint of non specific colour, smudge? although the first few loads of coal would probably have removed most of any paint, and darkened the timber.

As for the overall livery, I appreciate that it is your layout and there were always exceptions to the norms, but I cannot recall seeing a non-black PO wagon with black ends, and the black top to the ends is very conspicuous. Also, almost every PO wagon with timber solebars had them painted in the body colour with the ironwork picked out in black, although steel solebars usually were painted black.

Hobby Holidays stock a wide range of 7mm bits, including quite a lot of Ambis Engineering's range, suitably scaled up. Lots of etched bits for brake gear including push rods.

https://www.hobbyholidays.co.uk/products.php?cat=60&pg=1

On 31/12/2019 at 07:40, NHY 581 said:

 

Even the wagons from a variety of companies in various shades of grey would be interesting...not to mention the private owner jobbie.  

 

I grant you not Carlisle or Perth but very colourful all the same......

 

Rob. 

Apart from the various (Fifty?) shades of wagon grey, there was plenty of colour in the various company wagons, which, bearing in mind the pooling arrangements around and after the Great War, could be seen in various unlikely places.  The Great Northern painted their wagons a dark brick red, the LSWR used dark brown, Caledonian brick red, Highland dark red, the Barry Railway used "Three coats of Stevenson and Davies brown protective paint" (a warm brownish red) and the Taff Vale brown oxide, and up until the turn of the century you can add GWR and SER reds, and I've seen a reference to a Hull and Barnsley blue..  This is not to mention the unusual colours chosen by some companies for their specialist vehicles, such as white refrigerated vans on the GWR and elsewhere, salmon pink being used on the LSWR, black on engineering stock, and often on wagons the main companies had acquired either as hired stock or second-hand, and the GER and L&YR had some special liveries too.

I'm surprised you seem to have gone for the 6 inch to the mile OS map, when there are more detailed maps available, although they may not be exactly to era you are modelling. For example NLS have to 1:2,500 map for 1908, as attached.

I have to agree with TangoOscarMike, Compound, Jonboy et al. The buttons allow you to show your appreciation when you have nothing further to add. To me, they are better than Plonker123 quoting a long post and then saying "wow!!", meaning I have scrolled through half a page of repeated text, for nothing, whilst clogging up the system. The likes are also directly attached to the post in question. When you consider the ramblings of Castle Aching and Tony Wright's threads, and many others, I suppose you need to quote something, otherwise a comment without context would be meaningless, but when I do this I try to edit out as much as possible of the original text to keep things concise. I suspect things are different on Facebook etc.