Rails to Black Rock

Fiddly bits!

This week I have fitted the fiddly details. This has taken far longer than anticipated, especially forming the handrail for the smoke box. Welsh Pony has a Fairlie style smoke box handrail which has some really tricky curves and getting it to vaguely match photos of the loco proved really time consuming. The hand rail is not fixed and will be removed for painting along with the pipework , whistles and sand pots. The bases for the sand pots have had thin brass overlays fitted giving a curved front corner. These are a feature of the loco that obviously changed over time. Some photographs show the bases having a protruding ledge, whist at other times the bases seem to be simpler. I have chosen to model them with a ledge. This made a neater job on the model. The sand pots will sit lower once holes have been drilled for the lugs underneath them.

 The name plates from Narrow Planet.

I have added a wire hoop at the front of the tender to retain the current collection wires and prevent them fouling the wheels when the loco goes round a corner. Hopefully this will be quite unobtrusive when painted. I have experimented with several types of wire and the one selected is fairly flexible but with enough strands of wire not to cause loading problems I have encountered using very fine wire in the past. The coupling has been tested and is ready to mounted at the correct height. The Malcolm Savage couplings are one of the real delights of this scale, they work well and look the part, far better than Bemo or DG couplings I have used in 009.

The name plates and makers plates have arrived from Narrow Planet and match the cast bases well. I have been experimenting with paint shades this week as I'm almost at the painting stage. Various Tamiya and Humbrol spray shades have been tried. The Humbrol Brunswick green recommended by other modellers looks good for contemporary Ffestiniog green but looking at the few colour photos available of 1930s Colonel Stephens livery, it is not even close. The photos suggest a bluish green and there doesn't seem to be any paint that really matches. Interestingly there are several weathered front doors in our village that are exactly the colour suggested by the photos but all the doors were originally a shade like Brunswick green. Green quite an unstable colour and decays to a bluish shade in bright sunshine. Perhaps the Ffestiniog stock started off like a Brunswick green shade but weathered in salt sea air to a bluer shade. Another example of this is our Morrisons supermarket. The doors and exterior paintwork is Bruswick green in the shade but very similar to the Colonel Stephens green in those areas exposed to bright sunlight. So it looks like I will be mixing my own cocktail of paint which will be air brushed on.

The chassis has been masked and the cylinders and ash pan sprayed matt black. The connecting rods have been painted signal red. Its funny but in the past I would have been rather more cavalier in painting such parts, but now I do one part at a time leaving things to dry for a few days in between. The chassis will receive a wash of rusty brown acrylic paint to weather it to a more subtle colour.

So al that remains is to fit the couplings and to start counting rivets….