asmay2002

There were both Maunsell and Bulleid coaches turned out in Crimson & cream including the infamous Tavern cars.

The plates were supposed to be 5 7/8" high but there was variation between castings.

Did the other lines use a portable magazine/strong box carried as a load?

The point is that there are nowhere near the number of spotters from the 1970s/80s compared to the 50s/60s so the people that you think will come through just don't exist in the same numbers. I'm not saying that there won't be any nostalgia modellers doing this period, more that the balance will shift away from nostalgia modelling. This is born out by hard numbers from surveys not just my personal views.

I can't answer your question directly but GWR standard boilers moved around between engines and it was possible for an engine to have a top feed boiler at one overhaul and lose it at the next one. In this case boilers would have been interchanged between 14/48xx and 58xx.

You're making a huge assumption that most people want to model what they remember from when they were trainspotters. This is increasingly not the case. The 1968-1980 period on Britain's railways was depressingly awful and turned people, including trainspotters, away in droves. (I'm from this demographic and wouldn't model BR from that era if it was the last railway on earth). Secondly, the number of trainspotters declined hugely from its 1950s heyday so there aren't so many of them coming through anyway. Modellers are increasingly divided into Nostalgia modellers (mostly ex trainspotters) and what might be called historical modellers, modelling things that they never saw for real but want to recreate. The popularity of pre-grouping liveries is evidence of this - nobody remembers them first hand but they are attactive. The lack of pre-grouping modelling until relatively recently was I think because most didn't feel that they had the skill to produce it. That there was supressed demand came through clearly in a survey on this forum a few years back. There is a bit of a crossover with younger people's first contact with steam having come via a preserved railway.

As a bit of a wildcard idea the German state of Saxony had used a green and white flag since 1815. Is the NER colour meant to resemble the colour of the flag? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Saxony

MEK and Butanone are different names for the same thing. MEKPAK was originally MEK + PAK. Why do you think MEKPAK is safer or that pure MEK has added hazards? Logically it is the other way around, MEKPAK has the hazards of the MEK in it PLUS the hazards of the other stuff in it. Read the appropriate safety data sheet such as https://www.fishersci.co.uk/chemicalProductData_uk/wercs?itemCode=10227333&lang=EN if you are worried about it. MEK/Butanone is one of the more benign solvents out there. The solvents to avoid are ones with chlorine in such as Trichloroethylene https://www.fishersci.co.uk/chemicalProductData_uk/wercs?itemCode=10235920&lang=EN. If you need to, you can get huge quantities of MEK via amazon.

Speeds were lower in France.

There was a still a stock of ingredients whether ready mixed or not. "Just in time" logistics is a very 21st century thing - they wouldn't have rushed off to the shops to buy ingredients every time they had a new wagon to paint. WIth a grey that might have just been white lead and drop black plus linseed oil so admittedly these could have been used for other things.

The other possibility is in the early days of the SR works using up stocks of the old paint but with new lettering. It really does depend on which wagons and when. Doing a whole repaint somewhere other than on the southern seems vanishingly unlikley to me. "Southern Style" makes no mention of SR wagons in grey but does say that the brown went greyer as it weathered.

Is there not the possibility that these were SECR or LBSCR wagons with the original owners painted out and SR applied without a full repaint or are we talking post 1923 types?

That would be pre first world war.

A big problem in relation to PO wagons is that some companies had batches of wagons in different colours, some grey, some red oxide, others black. You can't necessarily tell these apart easily in a black and white photo, there just isn't enough information. You have to know from documentation that e.g. wagons 200-351, 400-532, etc were grey and 101-197, 356-397, etc. were red oxide.

The problem with white lead was not just dirt. Sulphurous fumes from coal burning react with white lead to form Lead Suphide (which is black) so that even if the roof had been washed clean of dirt it would not be white. Eventually it goes all the way to black with a bit of a brownish tinge to it. This problem also affects works of art. For a model, any shade between white and black is more or less plausible and every vehicle would be different unless they were outshopped at the same time. They didn't stay white very long but it was mostly the colour of the paint that changed.