Blog- Buckingham West - Old and Knackered

RSS Fetcher · June 12, 2014

With the house move still hanging in the air, it seems pointless to do any more work on the layout. Hopefully soon I will be taking it apart to go to its new home.

So my attentions have turned to rolling stock. This entry deals with two old Triang clerestories.

The livery is plain, poor and wrong. The actual model is freelance too, but we'll overlook that. I bought the coaches to be part of a workman's train, so I decided to backdate them and distress them. Rather than spray prime them with Halfords grey primer which would have covered over the windows, I sprayed some primer in a yoghurt pot and started to paint it on. Disaster! The pot melted! Beware!!!

So I ended up using thinned grey enamel.

Between 1912 and 1922 the GWR painted it's coaches a rather fetching "Lake" , not unlike the Midland Crimson Lake. Coaches were normally painted every 7 to 10 years. My layout is mid to late 30's, so really there shouldn't have been any Lake livery around past about 1930/32. But railway modelling is all a compromise and I like to stretch the truth a little too. So what if an old pair of coaches were overlooked and left to languish on workmen's trains on a secondary line and branch? They would be pretty knackered by then. So.......

A trip to Railex in Aylesbury yielded a pot of Phoenix GWR Lake and an Iwata Neo airbrush and compressor. Time to play.

But I still had the problem of the windows. Enter Humbrol Maskol. What a wonderful product! It is a latex which you can paint on to mask areas and later peel off. So I painted the windows and white parts of the roofs with Maskol. I then sprayed the thinned Lake and hey presto...

When I painted the Maskol at first, I painted too much and it went behind the coach sides. It also stuck to the sides of the window reveals. When I pulled it off, it took some paint, plus was a pig to get out from behind the coach sides!

After touching up and adding a coat of Humbrol glosscote They looked the part.

Decals from HMRS finished them off. The glosscote allowed the decals to stick better.

It was tempting to leave them in that state, but that just bent history too far - even for me. So a coat of acrylic matt varnish, Lifecolor Frame Dirt over the underframe and Roof Dirt over the roof. I am happy with the Frame Dirt, but not the roof. I had a vague recollection of painting side to side to look rain stained. Clearly it's not a good idea to do that with the airbrush. I had to do a saving job with Humbrol soot weathering powder. I'm still not happy with the roofs, but don't know what else to do.

I added Dark Earth and Rust powders to the sides and underframe and do feel they look fairly old and Knackered.

So, they are just about possible, in their knackered condition, but more importantly they add a bit of difference to the layout.

Rich.

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