Regunking the EANOS

While I was pottering away with the scenery on North Wattinger, someone posted a picture on Facebook or somewhere of a nicely weathered SBB EANOS wagon in HO scale, a bit like my pink Marklin Z one. 

So using his one for ideas, I dug mine out and added a little more rust and dust and grime on top of what was already there - looking back, I'm not sure I have ever posted anything about this wagon. 

Some ordinary thinned acrylic paint plus some rust and grime washes were used. It looks a bit overdone, stark and harsh in these closeup pics...

...but looks OK from the mandated viewing distance below (pic from the previous post on North Wattinger).

I didn't like the pink colour scheme originally and was going to repaint in grey, but the pink has grown on me as it is something a little different.

The load that came with this has always looked a little boring, even with some additions on top of the factory load, so I might make it carry logs one day.

Finishing up Upper Wattinger

I didn't take many decent pictures of the work done here, but Upper Wattinger is now largely done. 

From where we left off, the last of my various remaining pine trees were planted, along with some new fluorescent green trees that still need to be dulled down, and various other bits of scenic fluff were added.

My approach with scenery has always been to 'vary and layer.' Various means using many types of trees, foliage and colour from different manufacturers. And layering meaning that there is a base layer, which on Wassen is usually a dark green paint layer with some scenic 'grass' or other  ground cover applied. On top of this is often placed a layer of that scenic 'netting/web' that has bits of fluff attached. Made by Woodland Scenics or Noch, when teased out, it provides a nice 3d effect. On top of that go trees and bushes (foam clump foliage from Woodland Scenics and Fine Leaf Foliage also from Wodland Scenics, plus any old stuff I have lying around). 

In the really hilly bits here I've tended to put the base layer in, plant trees, then fill up the visible gaps with scenic fluffnet or clump foliage, and then detail with the odd filigree tree or grass detail (Silflor and other makers). Again always trying to mix up colours and textures so it doesn't just look like you've dumped a single bag of model scenery on your hills. 

I keep a box of scenic bits when I destroy a layout, so I use these recycled bits to fill up gaps and provide variety. I even have some old rubberised foliage that must be 30 years old. It looks terrible (it was probably the shizznit back then) but is fine when used sparingly under trees and filling in distant holes.

In another first for me, I tried weathering the ballast. To support a local hobby shop, I picked up a "Rail Weathering" box of Lifecolor paints (Italian?).  Using  a thinned mix of 'Sleeper Grime' and 'Brake Dust' brushed around the tracks, with some 'roof dirt' to simulate shadows in the tunnels. I reckon this looks pretty decent for a first effort so will have to do it on the rest of the layout. The Gotthard is a steep double tracked line, so I intended to make the downhill track more 'yellow/ brake brake dust' for brakes and the other darker for hard working grime and sand, but in the end thought it better to have them almost matching. It certainly helps tie the lighter Rohukan ballast colour into my Peco ballast, which has a slight blue tinge. The two pics below were taken while the mix was still wet, so it looks more subtle when it dries.

As a final touch, the river was added, overhead poles were added and painted, and a few other bits of grass added along the riverbank. There are a few tiny patches in the forest that need to be attended to, and that road bridge needs some concrete piers, but this looks pretty decent. Certainly better than it did. 

As a reminder, this corner is the only visible part of the layout made from tight fixed radius curves, which were necessary to get the geometry to work! The click track is easier to get smooth tight curves in than flextrack - especially at the joins!

Marklin's Re 4/4 - Improving the looks - 4 - Roof

Most of the SBB Re 4/4s that I saw on the Gotthard were clean enough to see that they had a silver/light grey roof:

Whereas the Marklin ones have the same dark grey used at the base of the body. This isn't a terrible faux-pas because the roof weathers with carbon from the pantograph over time, but I felt that painting the roof silver might make an improvement visually.

Before that was done, the bolt hole for the Marklin panto would have to be filled in.

And indeed it was with a rectangle of thin .010 plasticard; and a square of plastruct ladder that had been thinned down a little was attached to the top of this to 'lift' the new panto off the roof a little as the real one is. My structure isn't entirely prototypical but I think it will look fine when the etched panto is glued on top.

Then I decided to bite the bullet and paint the roof silver - a risky endeavor that could end very messily, but with the aid of my magnifying light and a very subtle demarcation line that exists on the shell, it wasn't as hard as I had feared (although in these harsh closeups it looks like I need to touch up one bit that I didn't notice with the naked eye):

Per the prototype, you'll see that the larger grilles were left the Marklin gray colour while the center one was silvered up.

In the above pic you may note some thinned black added to those end grilles and in various shades to the roof as the first step in the weathering process. There seems to be a distinctive pattern to the Re 4/4 tops, with the dark panto-droppings down the centre, and often a little rust on the sides of the cab roof. The locos must be cleaned fairly regularly, as other than the tops of the roof and some occasional fading of the red, most 4/4s I saw at the time were in reasonable nick.

After this pic was taken, some dullcote was sprayed on and chalks applied to make the effect more subtle. More on that tomorrow.

Steel Shims

I received another second-hand telescoping steel wagon (UIC classification of 'Shimmns' I believe, which is probably the French or German word for "steel wagon") on yesterday's owl.

While preparing to weather it up to match the two already done, I pulled out the brown DB one that hasn't seen any love yet, and decided to give it a repaint.

New blue SBB and DB brown Shimmnses.

As the SBB ones are a shade of greeny-blue,  dabs of green and a nasty blue watercolour paint were squirted onto a makeshift palette, together with some white, in case things needed to be lightened up a little:

A little blending (I probably over-lightened it):

Close enough for government work:

Some weathering was added after looking at a few prototype pictures, which revealed that the real things are a real mix of sun-bleaching (particularly on the raised bits of the ribbed sides), but also are covered in coal dust and carbon (from the overhead presumably) in the crevices.

As before, this was approximated by drybrushing the bogies with some brown, and washing the body with thinned black and some streaks of browns and light colour. White soft pastel from the "Tamiya Weathering Master" box was applied to the ridges of all four wagons, as can be seen in the mini-mini steel train below, which is passing the Transwaggon train which doesn't seem to have moved far over the past few weeks!

A Tale of Four Transwaggons - 2

I took those four Habbins (Habbinses? Habbi?) down to the train room and thought - "why not just do them while you're here?"

A splash of Tamiya acrylic silver quickly dealt to the Nordwaggon logos. The roof and ends of the Transwaggon were painted light grey to match the other ones.

My too-small decals were added to the former Nordwaggon at a better height than my earlier efforts, and a little (perhaps too much) weathering applied to them both (washes and chalks).

As you can see, not much has changed on the layout over the past few months.

Another one or two of these 'Waggons' would give me a respectable unit paper train I reckon...

Cheap and Nasty Container Carrier - 2

To finish off this nasty and quick container wagon, a strip of square section plastruct rod was secured along the bottom of the containers and a trapezoidal drop-side added from sturdier rod as a representation of the platform body.

Rather than add a lot of details, I scribed in some vertical lines to represent the stiffening ribs (which should have been done properly as '3d' items but couldn't really be bothered for this wagon. I also painted on twistlocks in yellow and took a picture of it.

It looked blah, so I added the tie-down extensions above the bogie bolsters using squares of plasticard rod, and the protective pipe-bits around them using fine wire. Then I added squares of fine plasticard to represent the twistlocks over my badly painted jobs.

I didn't take many pictures of these steps in the tidying up of this quick and dirty wagon as I wasn't that enamoured with it during the process.

But after repainting some grey over the mess and picking out the twistlocks and tiedown extensions carefully in yellow, plus some random squares in white to represent fictional reflector strips and signs it doesn't look to horrible after all.

This is a trick I learned in 1:120 - painting on some random squares here and there and picking out details can make a model look a lot more detailed than it actually is. I've recently added such paint-'lies' to the blue wagon as well and it has tarted that up quite nicely as well.

A little weathering was applied using Tamiya Weathering Master soft pastels - mainly brown streaks on the wagon body and a little white and black on the containers, over acrylic washes that had been pre-applied.

Sure the containers are a bit small, but on the real Gotthard trains, the containers and swapbodies come in all sizes and shapes so this doesn't look so bad hidden amongst a string of wagons now that it has been finished off.

RES-uming Service

Its been several months since I did anything productive in the train room, being busy with travel and life of late. However, today I did venture down into the cave and figured that weathering a couple of wagons would be a quick an easy project for an hour.

As a result, here are three newly 'olded' wagons for the freight train - an RES flat with a couple of old sleepers in it, and a pair of telescoping-top SHIMMNS steel wagons. * As always, those wagon type codes are approximations only.

All were weathered with acrylic washes and a touch of chalks afterwards. Hardly works of art, but they look ok from the requisite distance.

I do have a third steel wagon in brown that I must turn into this bluey colour that SBB uses. In time it would be quite nice to have a whole train of them, but that might be quite a way off as I'd need to find or make another 7 or 8...

BLS Re 485 Connecting Europe - 3

On the roof, an additional power thingy was added, and the Marklin 'hole' that holds a screw-switch to select catenary or track power was boxed over.

These additions were painted, the thing was given a shot of Dullcote lacquer and a little weathering added on top. In general, these things tend to stay pretty clean in service.

Windows were re-installed (what a pain), as were the pantographs (likewise). The real thing has 4 pantographs to deal with the multi-country voltages but we'll deal with that at some later stage. At one end I managed to put in some sunblinds under the front windows that are visible below.

It could do with some underfloor detailing, but for now, this will do.

Flat out - another container wagon.

I mentioned last time that I have a few 'Res' stake wagons that lost stanchions in the post. It turns out that the tops pop off these quite easily, so it might be possible to turn one into a container flat.

There are many, many types of these as mentioned earlier, but I'm going to make one of the deep-sided ones similar, but not exactly the same, as this one:

Unfortunately, the Marklin chassis is a tiny bit wide, so when I add a thin plastic overlay the sides will stick out a little further than they should, but such is life. Hopefully it won't be too obvious. The sides were cut from some thin Plastruct strip that happened to be the same height as was required. I drew the angled lines on the plan to help me position my ruler and get the angles right.

They were duly stuck on. A set of containers was prepared: The K Line one was made into a 20 footer...

 A few ribs, bottom sill and tiedown hooks (from the Res shell) later:

And some detail and paint later:

It might look a bit crummy up close, but hopefully it will look ok in the middle of a train.  Its saved a bit by the nice Yang Ming container on top, which I think was from an American AZL doublestack model. The twistlocks' here are painted on blobs of yellow and weathering is primarily a washing of thinned paint dusted in places by that Tamiya weathering chalk. I tried to make some 'rusty pools of water' on the top of the gray container, but I'm not sure I got away with it...

While I was in the dungeon today, I went back and added a few more steel wire coils to the Res wagon with black thread, dusted some very thin gray paint  to take the edge off them, and weathered them all with a little rust.

The first container wagon (in the background) has been upgraded with a black 'data board' stolen off the Res wagon top, a re-blued container, and some weathering.

I need to add a handbrake wheel to the blue one, but other than that, it was a pretty quick build.

Rollin' on Dubz... RES wagon with wire wheels

I've acquired four of these 'Res' wagons (apparently the 'R' stands for 'flat wagon' in European) which came along in a freight set. I quite like them, but four is probably too many. I have some ideas for the two badly-packed ones that received a few broken stanchions in the post, but in the meantime...

The models are lettered for the German DB railway. Swiss SBB have them in their generic light gray colour too. While browsing the web for loads to put in them, I was taken by the example below carrying coils of steel wire. I've borrowed this image from www.photos-ferroviares.fr, so I hope they don't mind. If so, I'll remove it.

A quick splash with some paint washes followed, using the two Tamiya acrylic colours I own (rail brown and light gray).

 That's looking a mile better.

Next, I raided the house sewing facilities for some appropriate coloured thread.

And wound 30-40cm long strings around a tube of brass (that was probably a tad big) with a dab of PVA glue for adhesion.

Best not to wind too tight, as it's hard enough forcing the bales of steel off the end of the brass tube with your fingernails as it is.

Glued down, they look pretty good. I'm a few rounds short... but have run out of thread. Might have to make some black ones and add a touch of paint.

Not bad for less than an hour's work.

Sh*t Habbiins

Following on from the last post, a little weathering was applied to the Habbiins wagons in the hope of hiding any of the original artwork still showing through the dodgy airbrush work.

I don't have many proper model paints in sensible shades at the moment, so mixed up a variety of browny shades on a scrap of foamboard from some cheapie dollar-shop art paints, mixing various dollops of red, blue, yellow - with black and white seasoning to taste. The resulting mess was washed with some thinner and then drybrushed as appropriate.

I'm a bit out of practice, but the end result looks reasonable from the mandated minimum public viewing distance, which in Z scale must be about 2 metres.

I might yet break down and add a Transwaggon logo to the cleaner one at some stage.

Nice to have a couple of weathered wagons on the layout.