Motorised Dandruff: Little Coal Wagons

DB continues from last time:

After painting the 10 new LCs brown, all manner of weathering was applied with various colours and shades of washes. The intent being to make the 10 wagons look 'uniform but all different'. Some a little redder, a few a little yellower, a few a little greyer, a few a little blacker and so on. A few patches of fresh repair paint here and there, a few blobs of rust, and so on. Where the effects were a bit strong, I went back and mellowed it a little. I may do more of that, and will dullcote the whole lot to take any remaining sheen off.

Something I forgot to mention yesterday is that these Trackgang LC side and end castings are just superb. Fine, crisp detail without any casting flaws and no noticeable flash. Whoever made these masters deserves some quiet applause. Next time I'll get Russell to assemble them for me :)

As a finishing touch, black patches for 'Lyttelton Coal Traffic' stencilling were added above the yellow number patches on the new LC wagons, most of my other 'nice' LCs (a few can remain in a general goods train or join the coal train if needed) and all my 'less-nice' old scungy castings. Those ugly old fellas are a bit sub-par, but smuggling a few of them into a long train to make up numbers might not be noticed. And they're a bit of NZ120 history!

Annoyingly, I went through a few photo books after painting the black squares, and found that those 'Lyttelton Coal Traffic' patches are probably a bit 'late 80s' for my liking, and not all the wagons on the trains had them anyway! D'oh. So I painted over the patches on two of the new wagons and some of the old ones with body colour brown.

As I don't have the ability to print white on my Alps printer at the moment, I made up a simple spreadsheet like so and printed it on white decal paper with a laser printer:

This came out better than expected, and once I had my production line process sorted, it was quite therapeutic to add these decals to about 20 wagons. If there was any white showing at the cut edges of the decals it was touched up with black paint later on.

Then a set of wagon numbers was made up for the new wagons (and a ton of my old wagons) and printed on clear decal sheet. Most of these are actually real TMS numbers, but some were made up - its not as if I can read them unaided anyway!

To clarify, I can read, I just can't see.

And as an aside, here is a comparison of various sample LC models I have, starting with three embarassing survivors of the old bog casting factory from about 1992. For some reason I've hung onto about 15 of these well-travelled models. The masters were made with plastic sides and stripwood for the bodyside ribs, as this was before Plastruct rods were freely available. The four (very subtle, barely visible) 'bumps' on the sides (for internal rope lashing on the prototypes) were blobs of PVA! I made two masters as the first RTV mould broke up after a while, and the second one had integral little rectangular knobs underneath to hold the Peco couplers down. Note the bottom model in the pic is on a stretched 10-foot Peco chassis, the middle one on a Fleishman chassis with unusual metal wheels, and the top one on the usual 15-foot Peco. The Flashfix bondo bog stuff was often hard to get into the nooks and crannies of the rubber moulds and bits have broken off in the subsequent 30 years. Rather than being a 'proper' two piece mould, I remember forcing triangular pieces of rubber down into the top of the poured Flashfix to 'remove' material from inside the walls where I wanted the coal to be. Fortunately, the bog was easy to carve as it went off, so one could further thin the walls and open up that space for the coal. As usual, the two foot rule (perhaps even extended to "nobody should look at these from less than a four foot radius), will be vigorously enforced...

Next up below are two similar but different models, and I'm not sure where they came from. Note that the lower one doesn't have the lashing bumps, and its a very crisp casting. They might have been purchased from Rod Murgatroyd, or Rhys, or was it Cross Creek that made a few tops? The one that I've added a ridgepole to is modelled as an LB, with spoked wheels stolen from a 10-foot Peco chassis. Technically its the only one that can legally have the round Peco axlebox, although some LCs received roller bearings in their later years. The door detail is nicely done on this, but the oversized lumps on the sides are a bit hard to decal and paint around. Maybe I even made these myself. I must go back through the blog as a memory stirrer.

And then three-foot-six 3D prints, some of the details being more chunky in nature, but being one piece, they certainly go together easily! The top one has a strata line, and the lower one I've (incorrectly!) modified the upper doors. I must check these, but I think I removed some underframe/sill material to have the tops sit lower on the Peco chassis.