DG2376 - Now in Technicolor

DB Says:

With the first wave of detailing complete, it's time to slop some paint onto the model in the hope of hiding all the messy bits.

My plan is to make the model as 2376 looked at the end of her career. From the pics I have seen, 783 (her original non-TMS number) seems to have been South Island based for her whole life. She was originally a DH and was involved in the Palmerston crash (see the April 2002 NZMRJ for pics).

She was a fairly extreme example of DG tattiness when snapped by kiwirailengineer at Wharanui in 1979 (note the TMS numbers on the headstock):

The ÜberDruff notes that the track on the above layout hasn't been ballasted yet. My memory also recalls a nice unpowered old-nosed DG that he made once. Wonder where that is now?

783/2376 received a partial Dulux makeover at Hillside in the 1979/1980 timeframe when she was overhauled and became one of the DG 'slave' locos. Ken Devlin took the following pic shortly after then. Comparing it to the Wharanui pic, it looks like the red was been repainted as were the bumble bee headstocks, but not the roof or bogies!

AA654 has a pic of 2376 in 1980 at Arthur's Pass in his phenomenal Flickr photostream and you can see the loco was starting to get a little grubbier:


DG 2376 was withdrawn in late 1982, so I'm aiming for the above with a little more grime. I quite like this look with the fading red, the yellow nose moustache and the white TMS numbers on the sides.

Right, enough deliberating, lets sniff some paint. I used Floquil UP Harbor Mist Gray for the roof base, as it's a medium-light shade and Floquil Santa Fe Red on the sides. That red is a little pink and flat for Santa Fe in my eyes, but it's not bad for the DG here.

Floquil paints are not my faves in terms of applicability though, and I fear I've made a bit of a mess troweling on the paint and covering up all my nice etch detail. But the proof will be in the pudding I suppose, and we shall be tasting that soon enough. I've also partially drilled out the lights to take lenses in a future installment, and added a pair of horns stolen from the PA-1 top and their little mounting ears (a technical term coined by Mr AH). Although they look a little Prince Charles-ish in this pic...



I was not looking forward to the decal challenge.

Firstly because those nose stripes are going to be damn fiddly to get right by trial and error; and secondly because my ALPS printer only works about once every three years as it is possessed by Throckmortons.

Fortunately I had somehow accidentally printed up a set of TMS numbers while trial-and-erroring my DX cabside numbers last year that were completely the wrong size at the time but miraculously they fitted into the available space on the DG (!) so that was one problem down. Shortly afterwards I was staring at a set of N Santa Fe warbonnet decals and the beans started rattling around in my head...


These SF stripes are yellow with a thin black stripe on one side only, but after a little fine-line permanent marker for the bottom line (that marker also used for the joint line between the red and the gray roof) and some cutting, within 30 minutes I had the following (presented here in uglyvision):

Close enough for Government work.

Scayla, the god of modeling, is smiling on me this day.