Swissrail

Photos and memories were all I had to go on. I do consider that I'm pretty close as Andreas Hui of the venerable Hui Modellbau in Guarda told me he thought it looked correct. I do know the cream is correct as the BLS were able to tell me it was RAL 1015, in common with other railways that used it like the BT , SOB, SMB etc.

Thank you for that. I have seen that rake of EW1s and I have ben advised by a friend of mine in Switzerland that the blue the BLS used for it is too dark and that I shouldn't use it as a reference. This picture of Max Hntermann's below is the one I used after much deliberation.

My wife and I were with relatives in Italy for three weeks over Christmas and New Year so coming back to the dark and dismal UK was a bit of a shock wich gave me a bad case of the January blues. Modelling was not something I wanted to do but I have emerged however and reignited the Lima AB project. Both shells have had their lettering done and the satin varnish applied to protect it all. Steve at Railtec has done a stellar job of the BT lettering. The colour is spot on. After this comes the weathering which will get done over the weekend. Alan Edinburgh

This afternoon I spent time building up the underframe from the various parts in the box together with fabricating a second battery box from plasticard which is found under the AB together with relocating the voltage regulator.

The BLS shell has now had its paint job. Next task is the transfers which should be delivered from Railtec soon. Masking for that first class stripe to go round onto the end wasn't easy!

The BT shell has now had its coats of green and cream. The cream is Vallejo Model Air acrylic and although it's marketed as "airbrush ready" I find it needs a little thinning to make it flow more easily through the airbrush. Experimentation has shown that three drops to every ten of paint is about right. The green is the correct RAL 6009 but as it's sold as a military colour by AK Interactive it's EXTREMELY matt. That said I have to give the green half of the shell a coat of gloss in any case so the Railtec tansfers will take correctly to the side without silvering. The paint is very nice stuff with an incredible opacity...some of the best paint I've come across which needs thinned quite a bit for airbrushing as it's quite thick. Isopropyl alcohol does the job and this was recommended by the firm who sold it to me.

Back to the BT shell. I've fabricated the extractor fans at each end and primed it. The first coat showed up some deficiencies in the filling of the centre seam and the modifications at the ends. After some extra filling and rubbing down, a second coat of Halfords grey primer was added and now the surface is perfectly smooth and ready for its first coat of RAL 1015 beige.

As a result of my project to build a six car BLS EW I train I realised the SBB coaches I'll be using as donor vehicles don't have the correct pattern roofs. The BLS ones have ventilator grilles above the passenger doors and the SBB ones don't. I wracked my brains to come up with a decent way of making the grilles so they'd be indistinguishable from the factory created ones and I came to the conclusion there was really only one way to do it. I was going to have to have the correct design 3D printed in resin. The problem was I'd never successfully touched 3D CAD before yesterday; the few times I'd tried it in the past I gave up in disgust, but after going through some posts on the subject here on RMWeb I downloaded the free version of Autodesk Fusion 360 and watched a beginners' video. It's one of the steepest learning curves I've ever had to climb but it's a good bit simpler to use and more intuitive than the other packages I tried before. I'm never going to design complex machines with this stuff but roofs and other simple(ish) components look like being within my reach. It's frustrating to begin with but I've become addicted to the process and it's actually a lot of fun seeing something recognisable appear as you intended it to. After a lot of false starts here is my, as yet, bare bones Lima style roof with the corner locating clips constructed. It's still to have two more clips along both sides of the roof's length and the ribs, rainstrips and ventilator panels are yet to be done but I think it's coming on nicely.

Today the roof got its rather distinctive roof-end rainstrips after the original SBB style groove was filled in.

I've now ftted the correct large headed round buffers based on photos sent by friends of mine. I filed the original clipped oval heads off and drilled the shanks with a pin chuck 0.8mm and fitted brass buffer heads I had in my bits box from my 4mm days...a set of MJT Great Western ones which were a perfect size based on what I got by scaling off those photographs. The next job was simply to cut the MJT shanks down and superglue them into place: I think they look pretty good for an improvised job.

It's funny you should mention that. A Swiss friend of mine pointed that fact out to me last night together with a photo which I then used to create new gangway doors. It does alter the look of the ends quite a bit. Here is my modification: The new doors aren’t yet fixed in place, I’ve just put them in position for this photo which is why they’re not quite correct at the top. First I’ll drill them for grab handles, paint them in white aluminium and once the shell has been painted, they’ll be permanently attached. They’re not quite 100% perfect…I did entertain the notion of having them etched in brass but the company I use has a minimum sheet size which is far too big for a small number of items such as doors and a few vents.

The ends of the bodyshells have to be modified. The double stepped end on these Lima models is only accurate for SBB types, the BT and BLS ones are different: This is the BT version: And this is the BLS one: And here are the modified shells:

The interiors are next. Because the second and first class seating is different, the point at which they meet had to be modified to give the correctly staggered passageway from one to the other. This meant cutting the last second class seat on the right down by about half and reattaching the armrest, filling the consequent hole in the floor with 40thou plasticard and creating a new partition wall. I've yet to add the door.

The shells are now stripped and reassembled in their new AB configuration. The plastic filler pieces are there to replace the material removed by the saw. I put the roof on temporarily to keep everything stable and square while the solvent welds set overnight.

Thank you for your concern but both isopropanol and butoxyethanol are alcohols and can therefore be mixed without issue.

That's three litres assuming it's mixed 1:1. When I bought my original 250ml bottle directly from Phoenix at an exhibition, the price label on it was £11.95...what I paid. When I got it home I discovered there was another label underneath it which said £5.95. I'm not therefore inclined to believe that Phoenix is a poor struggling company trying to do the right thing by making a reasonable profit. The're trying to rip the a*** out of it.

I've had a bottle of the original Phoenix Superstrip for years and it's fabulous stuff. Today though I had a accident; the Plasticard box I used as a bath for it had a dodgy seam and I lost most of the Superstrip down the sink. The present-day cost of it, I have discovered, is scandalous and it's not even the same formula any more. I'm NOT paying seventy quid for a litre of anything unless a it's single malt! Fortunately the Superstrip bottle tells me what's in it: Butoxyethanol, Isopropyl alcohol and Dimethyl Carbonate. I have the IPA already and I've just ordered a 500ml bottle of the butoxyethanol for £7.99. The dimethyl carbonate is imposssible to source in small quantities for some reason. I already know IPA strips paint and that the BE is a solvent used in paint manufacture so a mixture of the two, even if it is minus the dimethyl darbonate should do a pretty good job. Two questions arise therefore: Does anyone know in what proportions I should mix the IPA and BE and what was the purpose of the dimethyl carbonate in the original Phoenix formula? Third question I suppose. How can Phoenix justify the £70 a litre cost of Superstrip when the constituent chemicals are as cheap as I have discovered?

This morning I took my courage, and a mitre saw, in both hands, and cut the shells in half. I left the glazing in place as it is a one piece "inner shell" that can be cut at the same time. I have also removed the moulded handrails. The next stage is to strip the paint from them.

I use Corel Draw X5 and I export it in Adobe Illustrator .ai format for Steve. I also make sure all the text is exported as curves so that he doesn't need the various font files.

This is the transfer sheet I've drawn up for these two coaches plus a D-wagen parcels car I'll be converting from a Roco SBB model at some stage. This now just has to go to Railtec for printing. Some of the elements such as those inside boxes or circles look a bit skew but that's simply an artifact of my graphics card when zoomed out this far. They are correct in reality.

I'm working at the moment on the artwork for the transfers that will adorn my next two coaches. I'm going to take the Lima EWI A and B shown below, cut them in half and reassemble them as a pair of AB's. One will be in the blue and cream you see above and the other will be in the equally attractive 1960's Bodensee Toggenburg green and cream livery with the full title along the side.

This is my first upgrade and repaint of a Lima EW I coach. It's the first of a set of six coaches for my projected BLS train from the seventies so naturally it had to have the rather gorgeous blue and cream livery the BLS introduced in 1976. After a great deal of research and conferring with various people who remembered the livery, a letter to the BLS themselves (who told me they didn't have a colour reference!) and various cottage industry manufacturers in Switzerland, I came up with a mixture of RAL 5017 and a touch of violet. It may not be 100% but it appears no one, not even the railway company who used it, can categorically tell me it's wrong. The coach started out like this, in SBB 90s NPZ grey and blue: The first job was to remove the moulded handrails at the doors and drill 0.3mm for wire ones, strip the paint off and prime the shell using Halfords grey primer straight from the rattlecan. If you're careful the finish can be as good as an airbrush: The interior got a full repaint into prototypical cobalt blue and red. As supplied, the interior was coloured in green and red, correct in basic terms for the SBB although lacking in detail. The underframe was also weathered at this point and the two reassembled: The blue and cream was then applied using the airbrush, cream first so the blue didn't show through. It's a bit strident to begin with but later weathering will take care of that. The doors were sprayed with AK Interactive "Extreme Metal" AK475 brass paint which comes pre-thinned for airbrush use. It's lovely stuff. Et voilà, the finished article. The transfers are my own artwork printed by Steve at Railtec Transfers and a wonderful job he did of them too. The weathering on the shell is a MIG neutral wash applied and then wiped off with cotton buds dipped in thinners as suggested by George Dent. The idea is that it tones down the paint without making it look too dirty. The roof was replaced with the correct type and weathered with Railmatch Roof Dirt lightened slightly with mid grey as the dirt in Switzerland wasn't as sooty as it was here and it is in fact dirtier than it appears in this photo. I worked from a picture taken by the great Max Hintermann whose fabulous photographs of the Swiss railways in the 60s and 70s were my inspiration to do something other than simply run models of modern Swiss stock straight out of the box. Another four repaints and a Roco SBB D to rebuild into the correct BLS version to go...followed by literally countless others! I hope I have sufficient years left on the planet to do them all.

Update. I tried the Alclad 2 satin varnish. It 's a gloss carrier with matting agent that lies at the bottom of the bottle which has to be shaken to mix it up. I did this for a minute or so to ensure it was thoroughly combined, decanted some into my airbrush and sprayed it immediately. It went on nicely satin and after drying overnight, was fully gloss in the morning. The stuff is HOPELESS! I've now gone bought some Winsor & Newton Galleria satin which , if it is anything like as good as their matt stuff, will be excellent. Update: The Alclad 2 has never properly dried and now the surface of the model is slightly sticky even after a week has gone by since since I applied it. AVOID!

Has anyone had any success with Xtracrylic matt varnish? I've used it twice now and I found it to be awful stuff. The instructions on the bottle tell you to dilute it with water by 10 to 15%. When I did that it was still so thick my airbrush wouldn't spray it. When I did dilute it enough so that the airbrush was happy with it, the finish on the coach side was disastrous. Blobby, uneven and just terrible. I had to immediately wash the stuff off under the tap. I was extremely lucky that the Railtec transfers I had applied the day before didn't come off in the process. I was lucky to get away with it. Needless to say the Xtracrylic went in the bin and I'm going to try Alclad 2 next of which I have heard good things.

At the beginning of this year I started working on lettering artwork for my extensive collection of Swiss rolling stock, a large number of which I intend to repaint into earlier liveries or at least weather into the rather filthy state that was typical in the 60s and 70s. I commissioned Steve to do the printing after hearing good things about the standards he works to. What he produced for me is absolutely outstanding. The quality of his work is the best I've ever seen and that includes the Methfix transfers I used in my BR modelling days thirty to forty years ago. The backing film is very thin and once the coach is satin varnished afterwards, it becomes, to all intents and purposes, invisible even on larger transfers where there is some joining of the various elements to create a single piece. I've "backdated" my first coach now using the Railtec transfers...an SBB 85 foot RIC corridor first, in Swiss parlance an 'Am' and I couldn't be more pleased with how Steve's tansfers have performed. This is the Liliput model as it came out of the box: The first thing I did was remove the original lettering with 1500 grit Tamiya wet & dry finishing paper: The next stage involved airbrushing the livery colour to patch paint the buffed areas where the lettering had been followed by a coat of gloss varnish to make applying the transfers easier: After this came the new Railtec transfers: At the same time I decided the interior needed a repaint since the original was moulded in a lurid green plastic. This is it mounted on the already weathered underframe. An this is the finished article, fully weathered and ready to go. I think you'll agree, Steve's transfers may be waterslide, but they don't look like it. I'm a raving perfectionist and even for me, this is as good as a factory printing job!