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Lining Things Up….
As usual, I set off over the festive break with plans to do all sorts of things and failed to do any of them fully. One aspect that I did get moved forward though was the painting and lining of a couple of my six wheeled coaches.
Back in my youth, lining pens held no fear and I could genuinely dash off a fully lined coach in a few evenings. Thirty years of pushing a computer keyboard has dulled my drawing skills to the point where I am close to terrified to pick up a bow pen and I have not had the nerve to line a coach for a long time. I am confronting this fear in a couple of months by attending a class run by Ian Rathbone on painting and lining at Missenden Railway Modellers. In the meantime, however, I can still line utilising transfers, in this case those provided by Fox Transfers.
Being preformed in straight lines, these do work best for the square panelled beading of some of the Midland Clayton stock, like my dia 501 full brake. I had taken care in designing this with beading sizes that were correct (and matched the Fox Transfers). They thus work quite well I think.
I deliberately left the handrails and door handles off at this stage to make the lining easier but the door hinges still created problems that I will need to touch in with acrylic paints; burnt ochre looks about right. I also still need to block in the black to the head and foot of the sides plus where the lengths of transfer where they crossed – I will do this with a Roting pen as I still feel confident enought to wield this!
So there is still plenty to do, but I am dead chuffed with this and it will soon be finished and ready for service.
Second up is a Lochgorm Models third class saloon that has been waiting for its lining for rather longer. It is a more difficult prospect to line as it has round corners to the panels and, over the doors and windows, shallow arcs. These can’t be formed with transfers as these are straight. I have thus used the transfers for the straight sections and then brush painted the curved sections with cadmium yellow acrylic paint.
If all goes well, the Roting pen can then be used to infill the black to the centre and form the curves across the windows and doors. Lets see!
Damaging Value…..
Over the last few years I have acquired a few coaches painted by Larry Goddard. As you can seen below, these are beautifully painted and, particularly, lined coaches. Although he is not really building much any more, Larry’s work comes up from time to time on ebay and I have been nabbing a few of these. They are not particularly cheap, but then there is a fair amount of work in building an etched coach and in reality the price I am paying for them is hardly a fair reflection of this time.
Whilst I have been able to line fairly well in the dim distant past of my teenage years, I don’t think my lining was as good as this and, more importantly, I have misplaced my lining mojo. Although I have plans to try and rediscover the mojo, these coaches do provide a means to get a few very nice coaches to get the layout moving.
This particular coach is to the LMS’s diagram 1778 and originate from 1925 – 28. They were the first standard design for the LMS and will have been found throughout their system, including on the Highland section. My intent for the layout is to have a pair of through trains to Edinburgh/Glasgow with through coaches to London – this will form part of this.
Whilst the basic building and painting/lining of the coach is top notch, there are some issues that I have sought to deal with. First of these is that the bogies are fairly clunky and being assembled from components they are unlikely to be truly square. Thus, I have disassembled these and used them as cosmetic sides to some Bill Bedford sprung bogies.
The coach as built comes with some paper concertina corridor connections – all very 1970s in they look and as they are stretching, they look rather rubbish so off they came. In their place, I have built some of my etched ones – these are a spin off from the dia 51 full brake kit that I am working on. This shows them part built and I will be looking to do a posting on these in their own right once I am fully happy with them.
If mucking about and making the coaches for P4 is not sufficient to undermine the resale value of the coach, the final task to weather down the very glossy paintwork will. These were obviously predominantly aimed at collectors and are finished to showroom standards. The railways of the steam age were amazingly dirty places and a loco or coach in an ex-works condition would be pretty mucky by the end of its first run, let alone its first year.
Thus, it can not stay as clean and glossy as this, no matter how beautiful it looks. I have a weathering day planned for a couple of weeks time, and attacking this will be one of the tasks…………..
highland miscellany 