Buckjumper

May I quote an interesting passage from Sidney Stone's contemporaneous work Railway Carriages & Wagons, which is a collection of articles first published in The Railway Engineer between 1892 - 1897? Stone was trained in the DO at Stratford and went on to be the Asst. Works Manager of the GCR. Although his writings only cover issues pertinent to carriages and wagons, he has some interesting comments on paint, and refers readers to 'Terry's Paints, Pigments and Painting.' Now that doesn't tell us too much, but can we infer from this passage that if the purple/brown shade(s) folk now think may be correct was being used, then Swindon was painting locos an inferior tint? A shocking thought!

You missed one

Good-o - I can talk about enamels; acrylics I've not yet mastered in the airbrush... It's possible the mix wasn't quite thin enough and that particles of paint simply dried in the internals requiring a full strip down, or maybe a build-up of deposits (which you thought had been properly cleaned out) which finally tipped the balance. I'm naughty and mix in the cup as I go, but if you're not careful and haven't stirred the paint sufficiently it can bung up the brush. I warm enamel tinlets on a radiator for about 10 minutes before shaking and stirring which helps to break down the thick gloop of pigment. I always blow through with cellulose thinners between colours until it flows clear, and then squirt through with Liquid Reamer which is a xylene/acetone solvent, and at which point you find more colour flowing out! It's incredibly dangerous stuff if breathed in, but will shift dried deposits from the internals where cellulose fails. That should be enough for a colour change, but isn't enough if you want the airbrush to work without fail next time. After an airbrushing session I always run through with cellulose until clear, run through with Liquid Reamer, strip the brush and clean the parts with xylene on some kitchen towel or using these brushes, lubricate if necessary and reassemble so next time it's ready to go. I think the first few times I stripped my Iwata it took nearly an hour, but I've become so familiar with it, and which parts need most attention, that I'm down to about 15 minutes or so.

Which paints are you using through your airbrush Rob?

Erik Olsen's P45 models are amazing, and I'd have been putting many of his techniques into practice here if BF wasn't such a big project. I've been visiting his website on and off for about seven or eight years, but I'm not sure if he's been able to carry on after the stroke he suffered several years ago, and he's not updated for quite a while now.

I'd hoped that would amuse No known Viking ancestry, though one of my sisters-in-law has relatives there. Finding two words for hovercraft, each requiring a different first person possessive pronoun, was enough to take the shine off a Friday evening (and you probably find that very funny!). Nice van too!

'Amazing', 'astonishing', 'wow', 'superb', and 'fantastic' just don't cut it on this blog. I don't think there are any suitable adjectives or interjections of approbation in the English language that really do justice to the undeniable fact that you've somehow infused a partially completed model with so much atmosphere it makes the rest of us gasp in astonishment. So instead I'll try something in Danish: Mit luftpudefart

Flintfield (GER) by Vincent de Bode in the Netherlands, and it was in Modelling Railways Illustrated Vol.2 No.2. More here.

If you were able to remove this piece and backfill with ballast the ruse would be even more complete.

Great concept! Of course you could extend it further by having a permanent way spine into which you could plug broad gauge or standard gauge track. Oops...did you just snap that pencil?

S is a lovely scale and is an all-Imperial scale of 3/16" to the foot, or 1:64, and therefore 19% larger than 4mm. There are some of us on here who model (I occasionally dabble) in S. probably the best person to ask about the locos on here is Phil Copleston. See the RMweb S Scale forum here and here's a nice layout in development

It has character!

Disposable gloves are a good preventative, but if you've got them stuck in your fingers then light, a magnifier and some of SWMBO's best tweezers from Boots will remove them.

A little before your period, the GW, and many other companies spelled them 'break' on official documentation, and some even had it that way on the van sides. Funny which details stand out to different people; I love the palisade fencing - the colour and texture is fantastic.

I don't want to blanket the place in snow, but contemporary commentators and photos often describe/show very muddy main streets - 'mud' being the Victorian euphemism for horse dung, so that may help a little. I think I'll have to resort to little and often over a protracted period to keep sane.

A bit earlier...1890s. See here.

Barely notice the flangeway from that angle! Blimey, now you've worried me. In my time period all of the roads in East London were laid with setts, Macadam was only laid in parts of the City and more upmarket streets. I could be looking at scribing millions of setts over the next couple of decades...

I think that's the mistake on the side with the reversing clutch... I'm sure most of us have done the same before, and will do again in the future! I like your natural wood graining on the open wagon very much, Chaz.

I'm sure we've all got stock with errors we know about, but which we've put on the 'to fix one day' list. I certainly have. Big picture first, fix details later. Pat - give Jim a call, I'm sure that for a few shekels he'll spin you a new set of castings for your Lowmac when he runs off his next batch.

You've got it; the Walsworth kit is partway there, so with a few replacement parts it'll be a real timesaver. Of course I've been caught out before (more than once) thinking a kitbash would give me a headstart, only to find it would have been quicker to scratchbuild, hence my keen interest in your J52. And thanks for the compliment!

Oh I've had some challenges over the years - one kit everything went in the bin except the smokebox door, but most kits end up with replacement bits. This is the latest off the bench, once a familiar sight in both north and east London. The only imported part was the boiler from a J67, the rest of the platework was scratchbuilt, most with a piercing saw, but the spectacles were drawn with CAD and etched.

Hi chaz - just catching up with the last three or four pages of your thread - amazing to see how a layout in progress can already exude bags of atmosphere. Your photos of the Walsworth J52 were particularly useful as I'd like to build a J53 - or strictly speaking a condensing GNR J14 - Walsworth seem to have put theirs on hold, so I'm resigned to buying the J52 along with the two relevant GA drawings from the NRM and doing a bit of a kitbash. If you'll forgive the temporary pedant's hat, both the Slater's and Connoisseur kit follow the mistake made by the early (and current!) Hornby 00 models in providing impossibly curved horseshoe-shaped rainstrips over the four corners of the roof. Looking at photos of these vans in the 50s through to more recent ones the wooden battens are sometimes gently curved, and sometimes straight battens are fixed on in a diagonal position. You'll find a couple of photos here and here illustrating the above.

And CPL can provide alarm gear too.

What an interesting way of tackling the lining, Matthew. When that old stranger the sun puts his hat on Sussex again, would you post up a few more photos please?

Yep, that was the one Dave. Actually I've just realised the same photo is reproduced (though quite badly) on the front the D&S pack too.