Swissrail

After a bit of a summer layoff, this is next for a liberal coating of grime to match that of the 1930 restaurant car WR10226.

This is the finished article. The sides were given a single mist coat of MIG General Dust to take the ex-works shine off the paintwork and, to give the impression that the coach was cleaned recently, I ran a cotton bud dipped in thinners along the rainstrip to simulate where the carriage cleaning plant's brushes take the dirt off the bottom edge of the roof. I then gave the roof another dusting of Railmatch dirt to soften the edge of the cleaned line that was created. Also dirt was run into the vents on the the kitchen side and the door seams and the underframe got liberal quantities of muck thrown at it. It now looks like a real vehicle with a good few miles on the clock rather than a showcase model.

Well after some delay, mainly caused by my cowardice at the prospect of taking sandpaper to a coach that cost a hundred and twenty quid, I finally grabbed my courage in both hands and went for it. Because the burgundy colour of the bottom half of the sides is actually the colour of the plastic, I was able to use a small section of a 5000 grit sanding stick to remove the old SBB double arrow emblem without worrying about patch painting the red and possibly not getting a perfect match. The area where it was removed however now has a slight gloss as opposed to the semi matt factory finish but all things considered I'm pleased with how well it went. I've dealt with the problem by feathering the edges of the "hole" in the varnish and once I give it a new coat to protect the TEE transfers, it'll be invisible...even more so once the shell is weathered. Now that it's done, I think it's pretty much indistinguishable from the factory TEE version of the coach. Thanks go once again to Steve at Railtec for doing another excellent job, particularly in the colour matching of the transfer.

This beastie's next and it's a far scarier proposition. This is an LS Models ex-TEE WRm which has the post 1979 SBB emblem on the lower bodyside. I wanted the version with the earlier TEE emblem on the upper bodyside between the kitchen and the main saloon. Unfortunately, that version was sold out and unobtainable anywhere...and I contacted model shops all over Europe to try to get one but it was not to be. That being the case I decided I had to get this version and backdate it. This means removing the SBB double arrow and applying the TEE emblem as a transfer. A simple enough job with delicate use of very fine sandpaper on an ordinary coach but this exquisite monster was a good bit over £100 so I'm slightly apprehensive shall we say! I drew up the TEE emblem and Steve at Railtec got the job as always. I'm expecting them in the post in the next couple of days. The grey infill is the carrier film so no unsightly border at all. Once I've done that, light weathering will follow so the coach ends up looking like this: Incidentally, if you think I've got a bit of a "thing" for restaurant cars you'd be right. I have 23 of them, mostly Swiss, but some French, German and Italian ones too. I also have one I'd like to convert from a standard "leichtstahl" third class coach:

And here it is, finished in all its grimy glory together with a picture ofthe prototype I modelled it on which proves the SBB wasn't always the squeaky clean operation it is now. The roof got new raintrips over the doors because the ones moulded by Roco were upside down (!) and I had to replace the curved handrails on the doors as the originals were broken. The lettering was masked with Maskol after two coats of MIG dust and then the shell was given more dust, a darkened coat of dust and the a light misting of Railmatch frame dirt. The Maskol was then removed giving the impression of the lettering having been cleaned with a wet rag. I wiped the dirt off in places like under the windows and around the destination board barackets to mimic water having run down the sides after the windows were washed. The kitchen windows were frosted and...job done. (Deliberate mistake though: the door handrails are on upside down...I've now fixed that. 🤪)

The shell has now had its three coats of Cherry Paints SBB green and very nice it is too. The lettering has been applied and a coat of Winsor & Newton Galleria matt varnish added to protect the transfers and provide a base for the weathering which follows next. The card masking is still inside the shell to protect the interior from overspray through the windows.

Latest developments. The shell has been stripped and primed with Halfords grey primer ready for the Cherry Paints SBB green to be airbrushed on. I masked the interior using lightweight card inserted into the slots that normally hold the glazing in place. The roof has had its preliminary weathering over the AK Interactive white aluminium base coat. I used MIG general dust filter darkened slightly with their brown wash which is then wiped off in strokes across the roof using a cotton bud dipped in thinners. This gives the impression of rain-created streaks. I then gave it a dusting of Railmatch roof dirt, again in the direction of the roof ribs. The next process will be to put blobs of Maskol in various places and then spray the whole roof filthy black as in the picture above. The Maskol is then removed and the dirty silver shows through in patches as if the dirt had peeled off. It's a George Dent trick and this is the first time I will have used it. I've also weathered the underframe using Railmatch frame dirt as a base coat followed by various touches of MIG dark wash and Phoenix Paints weathering (which is like sooty thinners) to imitate oily patches and give the chassis a less uniform look. After that it gets a fine misting of MIG dust to blend it all together.

Wow! That's a bit wierd! Your effects look good but an airbrush would blur the various delineations of colour and you could give an overall coat of dust would soften the definition of the dirt and grime.

Actually I've decided to keep it now as it's grown on me but you're right, I didn't weather it very heavily in the end because I found a number of pictures of the violet and grey version I was actually working on which were all much cleaner. By that time, the early 90s, the SBB were using more and more carriage washing plants and it kept the fleet looking tidier than when that red and grey one was photographed in 1984. I agree that the factory finishes on most continental models are usually very good but if you do weather them, it lifts them from toylike perfection to genuine scale models. The first time I tried it my heart was in my mouth but once you get to grips with it, the results are well worth the effort. George Dent and Martyn Welsh's books on the subject are required reading and a high end airbush is a necessity. If you try this kind of delicate work with a £20 Chinese knockoff you'll regret it. I use a Harder & Steenbeck Infinity 2 in 1 and it is the best of the four airbrushes I have owned over the years by a significant margin.

Sometimes not!

It was taken in 1967

The transfers I use don't have carrier film so I have to come up with a way of cleaning the lettering without making it too clean. I need it still to look a bit dusty as if it was cleaned off a while ago. It also strikes me that these bogies look remarkably like BR4s despite the fact the Swiss ones were built in 1930!

This is the next project, a bit more my era: Another restaurant car but a much older one this time: SBB Type Dr4 No. 25. It will be repainted in green, renumbered as WR 10226 and be made to look like this gloriously filthy example:

And here it is. Finished and weathered to a slightly grubby appearance. Handrails have been added on the doors. On the corridor side I added the handrail to the inside of the rightmost three windows. From this side you can more clearly see the circuit breaker and bus bars. I also added the air pipe to the pantograph lifting cylinder visible towards the pantograph's main hinge. It's been a interesting project as this is the first coach I have modified without repainting. It is however a fairly substantial improvement on the original Liliput model. The issue is this coach is outside my main area of interest. I decided that my cutoff date for rolling stock I could run would be 1988. This one is from 1992 so doesn't really fit with my roster. I am therefore going to sell it and use the funds to buy the upcoming LS Models red and grey version of this coach.

It's my screen name.

Today, the other side got its window frames. I removed the pantograph for weathering. You can now see the circuit breaker and insulators that were added.

Now the roof and underframe have been weathered and the superb Railtec 3D window frames transfers have been applied to one side. I'll let them dry for a day or so and then airbrush the side with satin varnish to protect them before I turn the coach over and apply the window frames to the other side. They absolutely transform the look of the rather basic Liliput bodyshell.

I've now created the circuit breaker array on the roof using bits of 0.3mm and 0.5mm wire. The original insulators on the transformer box were cut off as they were in the wrong place and repurposed as the support insulators for the two cranked arms of the circuit breaker. I had to drill these insulators 0.3mm and insert a wire to create a mounting post for the cranked arms, the wire of which was flattened using fine nosed pliers and then drilled 0.3mm. An insulator I had in my spares box was used as a main input to the transformer. I drilled a 0.5mm hole in it to accept a 0.5mm bus-bar bent up and attached to the circuit breaker support insulator using UV activated welding plastic. The photos are a bit cruel...from a normal viewing distance the whole thing, I think, looks really good. A very fiddly job but well worth the effort as the Liliput model was bereft of any detail associated with the pantograph.

The next job was to chamfer the bottom corners of the bodyshell as in the prototype. Fortunately, Liliput thought to include the angled chassis members on the underframe which were never seen but are now correctly exposed.

The first thing I've done is install a height limiter on the pantograph. It's a 14BA nut sweated onto the base just in front of the bottom of the main arm which forms the spring mounting point. A cut down bolt is then screwed into place. The pantograph is then raised and the screw turned until the height it can rise is reduced to 70mm above rail level. It is then fixed at this point with a dot of Loctite 601 threadlock and allowed to set. Once the pantograph is mounted on the vehicle roof, the limiter is invisible. My overhead wiring will be constructed from 0.2mm copper wire set to 69mm above the rails and this means the pantograph will always touch the wire with just enough upwards deflection to simulate reality. I developed this idea because there are four things in modelled overhead that have driven me demented ever since I was a boy. 1. Overscale thickness wiring; I've seen some layouts where the wiring is the thickness of drain pipes and not even straight or level! 2. Pantographs that push the wire upwards the equivalent of a scale metre or more, 3. Pantographs that get round these problems by being set so low they don't touch the contact wire at all and 4, are limited in height by the rather crude use of bits of thread or wire to hold them down which looks awful. For me, part of the fascination of electric traction is the interaction of pantograh and contact wire and I've spent a long time and tried many things before arriving at this method which is, in my experience, the only one that really does the job. It also means the structures can be built more to scale because the wiring doesn't have to have any more than minimal tension applied...just enough to keep it straight but without exerting any strain on structures, particularly on curves.

As a result of the RMWeb migration causing the loss of the pictures from my previous thread, I thought I'd start a new one to take up from where I left off. This is next on the workbench by way of a change from repainting EW I's and a bit more up to date this time: A Liliput EW III Restaurant in the, I have to admit, fairly gaudy two tone violet and grey livery a few of these carriages wore. I would normally have repainted this into the original Swiss Expres orange and grey of the 1970s but I have another one these in that livery which I intend to add to my LS Models eight car Swiss Express set which is presently on order. This therefore is an experiment to see if upgrading this model will be a decent match for the LS models vehicles. It has already had a new pantograph fitted as the original Liliput one was overscale and pretty awful. This one is a modified Sommerfeldt with a scale width bow fitted. The main stumbling block to realism in this model however is the windows. They have no frames whereas the prototypes had quite prominent polished aluminium ones as seen below: This picture will also serve as the prototype for the weathering scheme once the upgrade has been done. I originally toyed with the idea of having the frames etched in stainless steel but it was prohibitively expensive and fixing them to the bodyside was never going to be easy. I then discovered that Railtec could do 3D transfers so I contacted Steve to ask if it was possible to create what I was after. He told me it was so I set about doing the artwork for them. Steve has done his usual amazing job and the frames are just beautiful and at 0.25mm thick, just about right for the representation of what the real thing carried.

This is next on the workbench by way of a change from repainting EW I's and a bit more up to date this time: A Liliput EW III Restaurant in the, I have to admit, fairly gaudy two tone violet and grey livery a few of these carriages wore. I would normally have repainted this into the original Swiss Expres orange and grey of the 1970s but I have another one these in that livery which I intend to add to my LS Models eight car Swiss Express set which is presently on order. This therefore is an experiment to see if upgrading this model will be a decent match for the LS models vehicles. It has already had a new pantograph fitted as the original Liliput one was overscale and pretty awful. This one is a modified Sommerfeldt with a scale width bow fitted. The main stumbling block to realism in this model however is the windows. They have no frames whereas the prototypes had quite prominent polished aluminium ones as seen below: This picture will also serve as the prototype for the weathering scheme once the upgrade has been done. I originally toyed with the idea of having the frames etched in stainless steel but it was prohibitively expensive and fixing them to the bodyside was never going to be easy. I then discovered that Railtec could do 3D transfers so I contacted Steve to ask if it was possible to create what I was after. He told me it was so I set about doing the artwork for them. Steve has done his usual amazing job and the frames are just beautiful and at 0.25mm thick, just about right for the representation of what the real thing carried. Once I'm back from Wengen in about ten days, I'll get to work on this beast.

I've now painted in the seam between the doors, the gaskets round the windows and the door handles. I'm not entirely happy with it; the seam is okay but getting a consistent line round the windows was very difficult. From a normal viewing distance it appears to work but I'll have to come up with a better way of doing it. It might involve painting the gaskets and seams in black first and them masking them off before the rest of the door is painted in silver or brass. Update: I've done the BLS and BN vehicles' doors with the Bob Moore lining pen's fine head which fits perfectly into the groove where the seam is. Far quicker and much more accurate than a fine paintbrush.

That's a very good point and something I missed. I'll get right onto it!

Here they are, finally finished today. I'm very happy with them; the Lima shells are terrific to work on and when the interiors are fully painted and the paintwork weathered, they come up as reality in miniature much more than the original models ever did.