Swissrail

Whoever's doing this "scrapyard weathering" is crap at it.

Funny place to put the flangeless drivers!

Go$turd is clearly collecting junk at fleamarkets for pennies and trying to sell it for silly money on Ebay. You've got to question the man's intelligence. I mean, who would ever buy junk like this in the first place with the aim of trying to selling it on? As business models go, it's laughable!

That film is an excellent exposé of the utter bo**ocks that is modern "art" and what those who pretend to understand it, say about it.

It also looks like it was painted with a loo brush that had just been used to clean the loo!

That man Gostude needs help of the psychiatric variety. Either that or he's just a chancer and breedy gastard.

I did recently get a twin pack of mint condition exact length Roco SBB couchettes from Rails for £39.50. They were supposed to be £59.50 as are all the other twin packs of Roco coaches they have. I assumed someone did a typo so I grabbed them with both hands before anyone noticed the mistake. 😊

Just look at the size of that thing and whoever painted it STILL couldn't do the lining properly!

True, but they're proving themselves to be unscrupulous by even attempting to sell this poo. No decent human being would.

That's BONKERS!

In the days before Ebay, stuff like this would have been found only at a church jumble sale for 20p...or the bin. I don't believe for a second that Rocket Railways don't know what they're doing here by trying to sell junk like this other than scamming people of little brain and laughing all the way to the bank over it. It's despicable...and Ebay doesn't give a toss.

I decided I needed to get a move on with this project so I thought I'd have a go at the windows. As you can see the original model had Klein windows: But they have to be modified to the earlier full-pane drop down type. I had seen videos on You Tube that showed the way aeromodellers remove unsightly seams etc. from aircraft canopies so I decided to try it. I used various sanding sticks, starting with fairly rough to get the window frames off and then went to finer and finer grades to get the glazing completely flat as it is very slightly concave as moulded: I used further finer and finer flourpapers until I ended up polishing with TCut which gave me the high gloss transparency I was looking for: What I need to do now is add the hooded vents and the little knobs on the inside that are used by passengers to pull the windows down.

I've decided to postpone this project for now. I applied the lettering to one side as you can see but I managed to get it all a millimetre too high and now that I know it's not right I can hardly bear to look at it. I've asked Steve at Railtec if he can reprint the SPEISEWAGEN WAGON RESTAURANT lettering again for me so I can strip this attempt off and then do it properly. I must have been having an off day because I thought I'd checked and double checked the alignment and only noticed the error after it was too late to do anything about it. I left it for a couple of days to see if I could just let it go but I can't. Only once I can get rid of the mistake and redo that side in one go will I be able to come back to it and finish it. This one's been a bit of a pig actually. The paint I was using is cellulose and the colour wasn't right to begin with and then I couldn't get a decent finish so it was stripped back to the plastic twice before I was happy with it. Now I have this lettering debacle! I just have to drop it and come back to it after my batteries have recharged.

Agreed chb2488. I was trying to emphasise the central entrance variant but I couldn't find a picture of one! I'll try to find one that's more typical.

Hi Pete Sorry I missed this most recent post of yours. The internal coaching stock in the 70s was a mixture of EWI (built 1956-1967) and II (built 1965 -1975) together with the lightsteel coaches (built 1937 -1957). There are several types of these but the main ones are these two: There were also lightsteel restaurant cars, in fact, the one I'm working on now is a lightsteel: There were also these heavyweight steel coaches from the 1920s and before: The only EWIs I've worked on so far are the two BLS ones I showed you and this Bodensee Toggenburg AB that was built from the other halves of the two coaches that were used to create the BLS one: Alan

I next had to create new steps for under the main doors. I used an piece of Evergreen plastic channel section that gave me the step once the top web was removed. I thought that creating the step from two pieces glued together would be too flimsy: It was attached to the coach using a reinforcement piece on the inside that meant the step would have more strength than if it was simply attached from underneath: I then had to file away part of the chassis to clear this new element: Painting is next. Halfords' rattlecan grey primer very carefully applied followed by three or four sprayed coats of Cherry Paints SBB Green... EDIT: ...which turns out not to be the correct colour. It's more akin to GWR & BR green in that there's not enough blue in it. I eventually found a supplier in Grimsby that does the correct NCS range of colours. As it turns out, although the 'absolute' colour is NCS 8010-B90G, that had too much blue in it. I therefore took an LS Models RIC coach in what I judged to be the correct green to Humberside Paints and they spectroscopically scanned it to assess its colour. I asked them why the given shade was too blue and they told me it's caused by the fact that British pigments are slightly different from the ones used in Switzerland. The colour they came up with from the scan was one shade removed from the 'real' one, namely, NCS 8010-G10Y, so I got them to mix me a 100ml tin in cellulose which should last me for years.

Thank you Vectispete for those kind words. It is very rewarding to see the transformation from out-of-the-box pefection to real life appearance when the dirt is added. As to a layout thread, I have no layout...as yet. There are plans to build an eight metre long garden room more or less specifically intended to house my future layout along one wall with spirals at each end leading to the fiddle yard underneath but it's a couple of years away at the moment, so I satisfy myself with repaints and conversions of coaches. I have a fairly enormous library of photos, artwork I've created and information I've gathered over the last seventeen years or so since I abandoned modelling British Railways when my interest moved over to continental modelling in general and 60s & 70s Switzerland in particular. If you're going to weather your stock , in my experience you need three things before you start: Martin Welch's book on weathering, George Dent's book on weathering (read both from cover to cover thoroughly, preferably more than once) and as good an airbrush as you can afford. Doing this kind of work with a cheap airbrush will cause disaster and heartache in equal measure. Contemporary continental models are exquisitely crafted and very expensive so you don't want to be ruining them by attempting to weather or modify them with the use of poor quality tools. My airbrush is a Harder & Steenbeck Infinity 2 in 1. True, it cost a small fortune but the finish I can get with it is second to none and a considerable improvement over the Badger 155 I had before it. I had to push the boat out on the thing because, as an incurable perfectionist, I literally wouldn't have been able to sleep at night if I had bought something less well put together. It is a thing of beauty as well as being a superb tool. Another tip I would give about weathering is not to use your imagination about how you think it ought to look. Copy a photo of a particular vehicle. I doesn't matter if it's not the prototype of the coach you are actually working on, but it will show you how the dirt is distributed, where it is, how much there is and what colours it is. PM me if you have any specific questions about how to go about it, what paints to go for etc. and if you need a photo of something specific I may have it...my picture library has over 100,000 files in it on virtually every Swiss railway company of the last sixty years. Good luck!

The first job after stripping the paint was to remove the steps under the main doors as they have to be replaced. Some very careful filing and sanding was required to preserve the tumblehome at the bottom of the door aperture. The white line at the end of the side is filler that was needed to correct for the misregistration of the mould where the end meets the side. The interior needed some major surgery. Liliput had made the bulkhead at the toliet end of the saloon solid, so it needed to be cut to create the doorway. They had also omitted the bulkhead between the main saloon and the single table that was used by the staff so that had to be added. The kitchen was a bit of a shambles in that the bulkhead was in the wrong place that meant there was no access to the kitchen at all. The corridor wall and the bulkhead had to be cut and removed. The hole created in the floor was filled with 60 thou plasticard and Tamiya putty. The bulkhead was then repositioned further to the right to create the entrance to the kitchen. The stump of the remaining bulkhead behind the rightmost seat of the staff table had to be extended so that there was no way for passengers to see into the kitchen from the saloon. I then created the upstand behind the sinks opposite the corridor wall as these can be seen from outside the coach and are quite distinctive: I also opened up the bulkhead between the kitchen and the storage area and created some high level cupboards. I don't think these details are particularly accurate but I think it looks better than the bare kitchen interior that Liliput created. I wish I could lay my hands on an LS Models spare EWI kitchen/restaurant interior. It's got every detail imaginable and much nicer seats. All that's missing is the food!

And for my next trick...another restaurant car! The plan this time is to turn this: into this: It involves fitting a new pantograph, the metal steps below the doors and trickiest of all, removing the Klein windows' glazing bars and frames. This will be done with finer and finer sandpaper followed by TCut for a final polishing. The shell will be repainted in green and Railtec transfers applied. It'll then be weathered but not too much as I think this one's colours need to be shown off a bit. Here's a colour shot of one of the prototypes by the great Max Hintermann. This is the level of weathering I propose to do:

Not quite Swiss this time. Courtesy of Heris, two Deutsche Bundesbahn MDDm911 car carriers. Only six of them were ever built in 1956, 1958 and 1960 for use on only one route, strangely, the Hamburg to Chiasso run through the Gotthard tunnel. I’ve therefore an excuse for having two of them to run at the back of a train composed of partly Swiss, German and Italian coaches. These beautiful monsters been given the usual treatment of MiG General Dust and Railmatch roof and frame dirt to give them that well-worn look.

After the episode of the MiG wash/filter mix not drying, I had to come up with another way of creating the dark grey grime I wanted on this coach. Using this as my prototype.. ...I came up, after some trial and error, with a mix of enamels I had in my stock: About 1/4 jar of Railmatch Roof Dirt A few drops of Railmatch Weathered Black Three or four drops of Humbrol 62 Leather for a little bit of warmth. I sprayed two coats of this, removing patches over the insignia etc., after each pass using a cotton bud dampened with thinners. I then added AK dirt & dust effects AK4062 to create streaks between and under the windows. It also has the advantage of creating a faded effect to the green area where the insignia is. It gets painted on in vertical lines and after a few minutes you go over it with a flat brush to streak it down the coach side and blend it in, taking away the hard edges that are created when applying it. I then used the dust/rainmarks and streaking dirt pencils from the AK10044 Weathering Pencils set to create variations in tone. You simply draw on the marks you want and then soften and blend them with a barely damp flat brush. They are excellent for detail work like this. I then created a light wash of AK012 Streaking Grime to darken the dust effects by combining some of the paint with MiG thinners. Then I applied another light wash made up in the same way from Abteilung Dark Rust pigment powder and pigment fixer to create the reddish brown finish. Once applied, I wiped it down with a cotton bud dampened in more pigment fixer. After that I used a little more rainmark pencil to redefine the marks under the windows. The glazing strips were masked off with Maskol and then the polished chrome frames given a coat of light grey to simulate age-related dulling of the metal. The roof was fitted with rainstrips above the doors, streaked with MiG Dark Wash and then sprayed with Railmatch Roof Dirt. The underframe was done in the same way as the other coaches I have completed and illustrated in earlier posts. This is the result: and this is what it looked like before I started. It's quite a transformation.

A bit of a disaster today and it was entirely my own fault. Three days ago I started spraying the bodyshell with MIG general dust filter to give it that well-worn and grimy look that restaurant WR10226 got. Everything seemed to be fine until I handled it. A fingerprint got left behind in the dusty finish. Odd, I thought, because I had left the shell for 24 hours to harden before going near it again but there was my mark, as large as life, ruining the finish. I decided to see if a dry cotton bud would do anything to what I'd done and it did. It removed the dusty finish as if it was actual dust. At this point, the job a right-off, I decided to see if washing the shell with warm soapy water and an old toothbrush would take the rest of it off. Again, as if the MIG enamel washes were water paint, the whole lot went down the drain and I was left with the original factory finish. This, at least, was fortunate because it wasn't on this occasion a repaint with decals or that would have been catastrophic since when I do decals for a particular vehicle I don't generally do spares. There's one set for everything and that's it. I could not figure it out and then it dawned on me that, because I hadn't done any of this type of thing over the summer I had forgotten the routine. A routine which starts with washing the shells in warm soapy water before anything gets sprayed from the airbrush. Oil was my downfall. The normal oil from my fingers transferred to the plastic in handling the model had caused the paint not to adhere at all. A lesson learned. But it could have been a lot worse! UPDATE: I have discovered after discussions with the MIG supplier that it may have been mould release agent on the bodyshell that was causing the problem. I had wondered at the time how the paint could have failed to adhere over the entire model. I couldn’t imagine how grease from my fingers would be so evenly distributed over the bodyshell’s surface that absolutely none of the paint stuck at all. Mould release agent explains it completely. FURTHER UPDATE: The problem persisted. Each time I painted with MiG filters darkened with MiG wash, the resultant finish wouldn't dry. It turns out that a weathering mix that contains a wash needs to be set in place by being wiped down with the matching MiG thinners or they stay wet and water soluble. Leaving it as an undisturbed finish won't work. I have now created a weathering mix using Railmatch enamels which will be used from now on.

First job is the interior, which Roco supplied in plain brown plastic with a separate corridor partition that was roughly the right shade to represent wood. I painted the compartment partitions in Humbrol 71 cream and then 186 tan which, when brushed over the cream, gives the impression of wood grain. The seats were painted red in non-smoking and green in the smoking compartments as per prototype. The floor was given a coat of mid grey. I then added pictures on the compartment walls which are simply a self adhesive freezer label marked out in 5 x 3mm rectangles to represent the picture frames and then dabs of felt tip pen to create the impression of the paintings used. They are then sealed in using Winsor & Newton Galleria satin varnish.

Agreed. I used to buy the paint stripper sold by a large trade paint supplier. It was nasty stuff but it did a great job of removing paint. Now they've gone over to an "environmentally friendly" version which is so safe you could put it in a cocktail, but it's useless as paint stripper. "Why do you even bother to make it anymore?", was my question when I took it back to the shop, explaining that it was rubbish. "Dunno mate", was the reply, "no one in the trade buys it since it changed". I despair! 🤪

Now that Fleischmann have given up on producing models in HO, does that mean the profi coupling will be discontinued?