Halter top - KiwiRail DX Part 4

DB says: Mmmmm, halter tops. But I digress...


What began as a 'rapid upgrade of an old resin DX top' has dragged and stumbled haltingly over the past few weeks…

Hiccup #1 was a bit of travel. Bruges is not a shithole. Chicago is a much longer drive from New York than it looks on a small map. Won't do that again.

Hiccup#2 was a final touching up of the red a few weeks back with some overthinned red paint which promptly ran down all the panel door crevices over the gray. Won’t do that again either.

Hiccup #3 was using a DB-mixed custom gray colour, which looked good until covering up #2 (and a couple of previous touch ups) left the DX covered in four shades of gray patches which looked awful. Won’t do that again either. I went out and bought several pots of gray paint that appeared to be decent candidates, painted some samples, picked one that looked right and recoated the whole lot.

Not a lot of other wisdom to share … drilled holes for handrails and used fine piano wire as I have done for about 20 years. One day I’ll see if I can find something finer - I tried brass once, but I like the way this stuff doesn't bend if it gets knocked, it just springs back into place. Brake hoses are wire stuck into drilled holes and bent down. Horns stolen from some old N scale top. Grilles are superfine mesh from Tasman Products of Wellington, again something I’ve been carrying around forever. Lights are MV Lens jewels. Technobits on the roof are plastic.

Logo decals were made up on my temperamental Alps printer from a side-on shot of the real thing taken a few weeks back and quickly cut out in Photoshop by setting the levels to turn everything that is close to white (i.e. the logo) into pure white and everything else (the red/gray background) into pure black . From there its easy to select and cut out the bits you want. They look OK from 2 feet. I’d hoped to lazily borrow cab numbers from an N scale BN green diesel decal set but they turned out to be too big, and they're not the right font anyway so I made my own. As an aside, there aren’t many typefaces that are within close-range spitting distance of NZR Univers (if that’s what they’re back to using) - check out the 90 degree angle on the top-left of the ‘5’, the straight legged '7', the straightish diagonal on a '2' and the top of the '1' when looking for imposters such as that old Lettraset we used to use way back when. Not sure if this is still the case, but custom produced, yet incorrect, TMS fonts were still mandatory inclusions in S scale commercial kits when I stopped doing that 15 or so years ago...

Overall, the (finally de-halted) top looks pretty decent from beyond the mandated NZ120 examination exclusion radius. Next time I'll make sure the handrails along the top of the long hood are closer together and I also have a bit of supersnot frosting on the windows, but I’m not pulling the cab apart for that...