Creating a goods yard

Scratchbuilding

Mainly I use double thickness cardboard for the shells of the buildings which are fitted together with Contact adhesive, after the pre-measured doors and windows have been removed its time to cover with brick paper, balsa wood or whatever floats ya boat ! The roofing is strips of thin card snipped at regular intervals to represent tiles, on the coach / loco shed I found some cake packaging material which is the correct scale (4inch corrugates) for o gauge.

Here a new experiment has been a success, using a layer of 50% concrete 50% sand I successfully made a concrete platform  

Scratchbuilding is fun and quite a challenge, take for example the fork truck, none are commercially available in O gauge so I made my own .....

https://christopherrussell1.blogspot.com/2019/12/fork-truck-project.html

Most of these items are commercially available but you can still have a go at making some pallets, I think you may be able to tell which ones I made ? a bit of rough with the good is always a good combination.

Have fun and hippy modelling or should that be happy ?

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Flaking paint and general weathering

Flaking Paint

There is nothing like having that lovely old bit of stock on your layout, and weathering is one the most important things on the modelling agenda.

Starting off with a dark blue, once dried fully and I hasten to add FULLY ! then you can add a layer or preferably two heavy coats of cheap hairspray, allow to dry then apply a lighter colour ... I chose sky blue, again allow to dry but not fully just to the touch so its soft.

Now the trick is to use very sparingly a light coat of Nitromors, as soon as it begins to bubble and flake wash it off in warm soapy water GENTLY !!, allow to dry overnight, then repeat the process until you are happy leaving the already affected areas intact.

I finished off with a light coat of grey as was used on these old Toads, white paint and lettering was then applied, then to finish off weathered lightly all over the brake van with an airbrush.

 

Tree building, construction and types

Fir trees using hanging basket liner

Spray painting brown

Cover with two shades of flock

Next method using twigs or better still petrified plant roots

paint ends and sides of roots with neat P.V.A glue

Cover with finely shredded sponge

Sponge can be spray painted if required

Materials, are :- various flock powders and shredded sponge and the rest below

Application of materials :- grit/sand then tea leaves and flock

Using scraps of basket liner to give body to the roots.

Paint with P.V.A then dip the lot in a tub of shredded sponge.

 

 

G.W.R four wheeler coaches

Painting a freshly built model is like the icing on a cake.

after spraying the nominated colour, here the next job was to apply the black highlights to the structural timber, then flood the top recessed sections with tan colour.

Finally a scarlet colour was applied to the droplights and the gold lining applied .... very gingerly I must say, getting the consistency of the paint was a major task in itself once that was right the lining was a doddle. Transfers are homemade using crafty computer paper as i like the faded effect on the letters, these were treated with some matt clearcoat to fix them in place.

The end results are very rewarding !!

 

Weathering techniques

Weathering :-

Weathering your model railway wagons and other types of traffic is pretty important

from a photographic point of view not to mention satisfaction,

Below is the Midland Railway Johnson class loco that has been treated to a mixture of light and heavy dusting of rust and mud colours using both an Iwata single action and double action airbrush, along with some very thin black enamel for stains.

British Railfreight OAA Wagon.

as it was the Heljan model, as we can see far too bright an toy like.

The first job was to give the whole red area a light dusting of white enamel in order to "fade" the red this worked very well, then I used some light grey to darken most of the lower panels along with some flesh colour to represent a few replaced planks. The chassis was treated with various browns using both types of airbrush the single action being easier to control for tiny rust spots. To finish some VERY thin runny black thinners was dropped between the planks and around the rivet detail to highlight all the details. the results are very effective indeed.

 Below the B.R Mark one coach before

 And after the same treatment

 The window was removed and a piece of plastic glaze glued in using self closing angled tweezers .

 A good supply of both acrylics, enamels, cellulose thinners and turps is essential for this job as well as a good tool kit, size 000 brushes are recommended.

 HAPPY MODELLING .

Class P3 J27 , using a matt black finish enabled me to use variuos shades of weathering powder that "stains" into the black paint. The white runs in front of the cab are thin white paint apllied with a tiny brush to represent limescale.

                    Below:- The "toad" brake van 

Getting on for twenty years old this model has been painted umpteen times. 

I'm rather proud of this accident with Nitromors ! The plastic started melting so I had to wash it off QUICKLY . The resultant layers of paint revealed look quite good with a flaky paint effect. Sometimes you learn from mistakes you make and put them to good use.

 

Kit built traffic, with homemade transfers.

Matt paint really does do those weathering powders a power of good, these three guys are lightly weathered.