A wet Saturday afternoon on the work bench

When I started railway modelling back when Adam was a lad if you wanted decent looking rolling stock you had to either scratch build it or use kits.
The only RTR stuff available was either Tri Ang or Hornby which in those days were intended to be sold more as toys for boys rather than railway models.

Since then RTR stuff has come on leaps and bounds each year the accuracy and standard of detail improves.

Take this Bachmann ex Southern Railway Van, The chassis is superb. Long gone are the big moulded details like brake levers and brake gear. Even the vacuum cylinder has levers and rodding fitted. The vacuum pipes and body detail is also much better now than it was only a couple of years ago.

Anyway, I picked up this van on my last visit to my local model shop. With Pen Y  Bont and my new layout(s) you can never have too many vans.

It was cats and dogs on Saturday afternoon so instead of layout building out in the shed I decided to do a quick make over on this latest item of stock.

My first job was to remove the tension lock couplings and replace them with Smiths instanters.
Removing the couplings is easy, just two screws and they are off, with no mouldings left behind to carve away.
A few seconds work with my circular saw attachment in my mini drill cut a slot in each of the buffer beams to accept the shanks of the coupling hooks which were then glued in with two part epoxy.


To make it look a bit more different to a standard RTR van I painted the roof in Railmatch "Dirty Black."
The body sides have been given a wash of Humbrol matt black and thinners. A little dry brushing of Humbrol light earth colour and light grey on the under frames and lower body side tones the "plastic" look down a bit. A dab of dark grey on the vacuum bags to tone them down and job done ...For now anyway.
I'm still not 100% happy with it, it needs something else, like chalk markings or posters to bring it to life.
That will come later and be another post here some time.
Still, not bad for a couple of hours work on a wet afternoon.

Cheers for now!
Frank