Paint Your wagon

First coat - rust: bubbles inside show just how wet this coat is applied.

Second coat - grey.

Just before ExpoNG 2014 (which is to say, the morning before), I got round to painting this Parkside Dundas Diagram 1/100 16T ex MOWT mineral wagon for John Clutterbuck's Pentewan Light Railway. The wagon had to sit on his (Dorset Kits?) transporter and therefore were re-wheeled to Scale 7 standards using Slaters wheels.

Knowing that PLR would get a lot of attention, I wanted to try and match John's very high production standards. I therefore dug out James Coldicott's article Paint & Texture from NG&IR issue 66 in order to weather the wagon properly.

I used Coldicott's article as the basis of painting my Weidknecht Decauville, but clearly only read part of it. For the loco, I went straight from a Dark Earth undercoat to a dry-brushed final colour, which isn't quite correct.

Coldicott suggests a splash of loosely rust colours covering the whole model over the Dark Earth undercoat. Only then is a very thin coat of top colour, much lightened to show fading, dry-brushed over the rust.

I chose to use acrylic rather than emulsion paints, and probably ought to have thinned and dried the top coat a bit more. However I'm not too unhappy with the paint finish.

With ExpoNG out of the way, the wagon and its yet-to-be-built diagram 1/106 companion will be consigned to a display case. Not before I have tackled a further attempt at the transfers, however, which were a tad too new looking and probably not very prototypically placed. Where I to build a similar wagon again, I'd also want to try and replicate the pressed-steel door insides, as the flat surface on the unloaded model is not right.

John's suggestion of a removable load made from broken-up lumpwood charcoal worked very well. Perhaps the unloaded wagon should show a bit more coal residue though: I'm not convinced that anyone ever bothered to hose these wagons down after emptying them, certainly not on John's imagined cash-strapped PLR.