Blue EMU - Part Three

Job done!

It took three attempts to get the motor coach right - on the first attempt I applied too much lacquer and caused a large run right at the front of the coach. This being the leading coach it has to look perfect so I peeled the vinyl off and started again. This time I didn't get the alignment right and then stretched the graphics so had to print yet another set.

Third time lucky and after three (careful) coats of lacquer, I had the desired finish I was looking for:

Replacement cab ends arrived and were painted using Vauxhall Mustard Yellow paint. I've done my best to repair the damaged roof of the trailer coach, a small scratch and chip on the corner is still visible but the plan is that this will be hauling another three coach EMU, so the damage here wont be visible and is still far better than it previously looked.

Trailer coach

Motor coach

...with correct numbers!

And all three coaches together in their new colour scheme...

Now to find a replacement motor coach...

Paint your wagon - Part Four

This will probably be the last post on wagon modifications as my stock box is nearing the magic 30 (29 + guard's van) maximum.

For most of my wagons I've separated the bodies from the chassis to apply the decals - not a difficult job, just a matter of bending the tabs underneath and then bending them back afterwards. Most have required very little work to the wheels or couplings and most are in good condition.

For my next design, I chose Cadbury, again there are many different versions over the years, this is a variation of my own which looks good on a tinplate body...

As I have a period Bedford HA Pukka Pies van on the layout it seemed fitting to have some railway wagons. They've been making pies since 1964 so it qualifies!

For this particular wagon, there is significant corrosion to the chassis so this has been left off while I repaint it...

My final wagon design is fitted to some of the poorest looking wagons I've ever seen.

I made the opening, and only bid on Ebay and received this pair of wagons, they really were as bad as they look in this picture from the auction itself...

At the time I considered that these would be fit only for scrapping - the roofs were badly dented and the rust is obvious.

For the roofs, I was able to push most of the dents out by hand, some of the deeper, smaller ones were tapped out using a hammer and punch. There is some kind of lacquer finish to these so the only option was to strip back to bare metal.

The same roof as the one in the foreground above, now rubbed down and almost ready for paint...

 And the final result - the chassis was cleaned up, wire brushed, primed and painted in satin black. The roof was primed and lacquered as per the usual process for the rest of the wagons.

As for the final design, had to be Hornby Dublo really.

This is actually a copy & paste of the banner on the front page of this very blog. Printed and cut to size, these look quite impressive - a far cry from when it arrived here several days ago.

I have now refurbished 27 wagons since beginning this task several weeks ago. With two more on the way I'll have filled the stock box and created a goods train formed entirely of refurbished wagons. These will not be to everyone's taste but I'll have taken 29 wagons, of which most were only fit for scrapping and certainly not for public exhibition, and done something different. These "neverwazza" items wont appeal to everyone but once again it's something different that you wont see on many other HD layouts!

Blue EMU - Part Two

The driving trailer has now had three coats of lacquer, to compliment the refresh I also resprayed the roof, again using Halfords grey primer (two coats) followed by a quick dusting of matt lacquer. The transformation is pretty impressive - the lacquer coats have darkened the blue and enhanced the black markings of the doors...

I decided to go with all yellow for the cab fronts, sadly my skills don't extend to repairing the damage to the front and it would be daft / criminal / insane to refit the coach leaving the front panel with a chunk missing. So I've bitten the bullet and ordered new front end panels. This coach will remain in bits until the replacements arrive.

The motor coach also has a damaged front, it's been that way since I bought it and was the primary reason why it was cheap, so I may as well take the time and strip the motor coach. While I'm at it, I may as well change it to blue - these look pretty impressive and I'm impressed enough for this three car set to head up the front of the train. I'll keep looking for a reasonably priced three rail motor car or trailer, whichever is cheapest.

So with this in mind, I decided to start work on a centre coach. I had two to choose from, my most recent purchase was again quite cheap due to the amount of corrosion along one side - as my layout is viewed from the front I've been able to cheat and run the coach with the rusty side facing inwards but there was no way I could just fit my overlays to the coach body in its current state...

So after a lot of sanding, the metalwork was then primed ready for the overlays to be applied...  

I scanned the coach using the same technique as before. I had hoped that making the graphics for this coach would be a straightforward copy & pasting exercise but it turns out that the spacing between the windows is slightly different. I copied one door & window group and pasted this along the body, using the original scan as a guide.

I also noted that the centre coach design is different from the motor & trailer coaches, there is no top to the doors, the lines continue over the roof, my coach will have the same doors throughout but this made the process of lining up the stickers really easy...

And this is the final result - resprayed roof and side graphics fitted with three coats of lacquer...

Now for the motor coach...

Blue EMU - Part One

I've tentatively named this "part one" although I suspect that this particular project will take a while to actually complete.

The background to this project is simply that I had a spare EMU trailer car, which has a damaged front and roof. I also recently upgraded the SR EMU from three to four car. With the recent amendments to the fiddle yard, the four car unit occupies an entire siding on its own (until I can separate the sidings electronically) so I would like it to be longer. This would involve adding more cars and this creates several issues:

Firstly, the SR EMU is based on a class 501 EMU, which was a three car unit so technically speaking I should be running two, three car units to make six coaches. This would mean duplication, and I don't do duplicates!

I would need to renumber the coaches, which isn't easy as these are super-detail, lithograph printed coaches. I don't have the technology or skill to repaint them properly and as much as I like the version produced by Coopertrains, I'm not aware that they were ever issued in a maroon livery, or as four car units. Making my own overlays was an option but a different colour would be needed as I would never match the original colour scheme. Thankfully these units were in service long enough to be painted in blue and then finally into blue & grey. So I decided to experiment...

First of all I needed to strip the trailer coach, the damage on the front corner can just about be seen and the roof will require further repairs.

With the body stripped, I took a high quality greyscale scan of the coach side, using the same process that I used for the wagons...

This gave me the image below...

After lots of image tweaking, I was hoping to flood-fill the image and colour it blue with one mouse click, unfortunately with this image it wasn't possible. I ended up re-drawing one coach door, recolouring the handles and then flood-filling this part of the image, I then copied and pasted this version of the door and windows along the coach as the pattern is repeated, until the guard's van which was also re-drawn from scratch. In reality the above picture acted as a template and nothing more.

Finally, I coloured in the windows, leaving only the end windows to act as a fitting guide. Unlike many coach overlays, I intend to use the existing windows so it was also important that my overlays line up perfectly with the lithograph printing underneath.

After researching the history of the class 501 I found the correct coach numbers, I then added a BR logo to the design and printed onto self adhesive vinyl before cutting and fixing into position...

Then came the job of cutting in the windows, a boring job! This is where the vinyl is quite forgiving as it's thin and stretchy, a sharp scalpel blade was used to trim around each window.

Thankfully the doors line up perfectly on both sides! - I loose-fitted the stickers and shone my desk light through the back of the coach to line these up correctly...

Finally all the windows are cut out...

Couldn't resist a test-fit! I'll need to either repaint the cab end blue to match (which may be difficult to colour match, or paint the whole end yellow. The roof, once repaired will also get a repaint.

Some minor fettling required before the coach sides are lacquered.

Although it's quite a light shade of blue, I found the darker colours hard to work with, it was almost impossible to see the door markings and let's face it, after a couple of years' service in real life, these things would have ended up several shades lighter than this one!

I now need to tackle the centre coach, I'll also need another trailer coach. No plans for a motorised version, the original EMU is more than capable of pulling six coaches, although my controllers can cope with double-heading, there could be issues with having the two motor cars spaced apart, plus it would work out extremely expensive as the motor cars are much harder to source.

Now to find another scrappy trailer, this may take a while...

Bodies

The biscuit tin's overflowing again with bodies and I had a spare bottle of oven cleaner, so I took a batch of bodies and gave them an overnight soaking.

This is how they looked after a night in the oven cleaner bag, by which time I'd already taken two 0-6-2 bodies up into the loft for further work (these will follow shortly)

After rubbing down and cleaning, Halfords grey primer (same primer used for the wagon roofs) is applied and allowed to dry...

Again I have no need for more 0-6-2 tanks but after the successful Atholl transformation, I found a picture of a Wrenn LMS 0-6-2 and decided to create my own.

The painting is done in the same way as Duchess of Atholl, with the whole body painted black, the front and cab roof is then masked and two coats of the red applied, this creates a darker colour...

As well as leftover paint, I also had plenty of transfers left, here one side has been completed and the individual numbers cut ready to apply to the other side...

For the other body I kept it simple and black, this graphic is home made, printed onto vinyl and cut to size, then lacquered over the top. I fancied a gloss black look and this one's really shiny!

By now the lacquer on the LNER tank is dry and the finish on the LMS is the final layer of the red, this leaves a shiny red and matt black effect, so for this body I decided to go with matt lacquer over the top to seal the transfers and give a uniform finish...

 The hand rails required some TLC before refitting...

And the LMS is finished, apart from the smoke box number which I'll print separately. At some point the whistle, valve and buffers will need colouring but for now this will do.

Once I'd finished the LNER tank and was happily admiring my handywork, I realised that my green LNER tank has the same number. Thankfully when I printed the graphics I also printed some additional numbers so I carefully peeled the stickers off, applied the new numbers and lacquered again.

This one's still tacky so I can't paint the buffer ends yet or refit the hand rails...

 I like both the gloss and the matt effects on these.

Paint your wagon - Part Three

Acquired some more wagons!

For the Weetabix wagons, I found the logo on the internet, the only usable version has a shadow effect on the lettering and the corn logo was to the right of the lettering. This was cut, pasted and resized into roughly the right position and the shadow effect was manually painted out.

I've used the wagon scans described in part one, added a white rectangular box behind the logo (as it appears on some versions of the Weetabix truck) and then pasted the whole thing into Publisher for printing.

For the Fyffes Bananas wagons, again finding usable, original versions of the logo proved difficult. In the end I found a good quality picture of a Hornby O Gauge Fyffes wagon and lifted the logo and writing from it. The background was then flood-filled to match the colours of the design, which was then lightened in Publisher as the whole thing had a mustard coloured appearance to it.

Wagon roofs repainted in the usual fashion using grey primer and lacquer, the intention now is to make an entire goods train built from refurbished wagons.

 Now for some trucks...

I find it easier to remove the truck body from the chassis, also allows me to service the couplings and oil the axles more easily. After giving the bodies a soak in warm soapy water, the paintwork on two of the bodies started lifting quite badly, the one remaining good body has a fair few scratches, so no issues with fitting overlays to these as they would never see use in this condition.

Dorchester Gas & Coke company was a real company and Bachmann produced a version of their truck many years ago. Although theirs was designed as a 7 plank wagon, the bulk of mine are only 5 so I came up with a design that suited.

Again a scan of a good truck was taken, colour adjusted etc with the lettering added over the top. I've also numbered the trucks.

My overlays are applied as once continuous sticker, wrapped around the body so it needs to be applied straight.

The sticker is cut longer and the top coloured black to assist with blending in the colour inside the truck.

Each overhanging side is cut to allow it to fold inside.

And then gently pressed inside the body.

The stickers have a tendancy to lift inside the truck body, so a small blob of glue is smeared along the edge to aid adhesion. These will need some touching up with black paint inside the trucks.

While the bodies are off, good opportunity to make sure the couplings are straight and working, also clean and lubricate the wheels.

And the final result - five more trucks, mostly fit for scrap, all restored to running use. 

Paint your wagon - Part Two

Now that the background graphics have been tweaked, they can be inserted into the design.

Of all the Microsoft applications, I use Powerpoint the most and find it the most familiar to create the designs and then use Publisher to create the final graphic for printing.

First wagon style - St Ivel / Unigate.

These exist in a later, plastic form and I own one of these already, it just doesn't run that well and looks out of place, also doesn't have the right couplings and is extremely light. First thought was to scan the body and just copy the image but the resolution and quality just wasn't good enough, so I went back and re-did this design from scratch.

After Googling the logos, the Unigate one was found and at a good enough resolution to copy and paste straight into the design. Handily their logo hasn't changed since these wagons were produced.

The same can't be said for St Ivel, no trace of the old logo above anywhere, just this modern version which has a narrower outer band and the extra blue rectangular background.

First thought was to crop the image and enlarge but it didn't look right. Thankfully the image resolution of the Unigate loco is much higher and I was able to grab the colour from the blue St Ivel logo and flood-fill the red Unigate one. The lettering was then brushed out and the St Ivel lettering copied and pasted into the new logo. The resolution of the lettering is much lower but for use on an OO gauge wagon it's fine. The difference in resolutions can be seen below:

It was then a matter of placing the two logos onto the wagon graphics, centre everything and print onto self-adhesive paper.

The roofs of the wagons were stripped, primed in Halfords grey primer and lacquered.

The final result:

The result is quite a reasonable interpretation of the original design.

Now for something different - Zanussi. 

Some artistic licence required for this one, although they've been around since well before the demise of Hornby Dublo, the livery I'm using is actually from the 1980s.

I worked for Zanussi and proudly drove around in a fully liveried van many years ago. The livery itself, though basic, was very effective and quite striking. It didn't survive for long and by the mid 90s it was almost extinct. There are very few examples of the old livery left.

This had to be completely re-created from scratch, so I found a PDF of an old washing machine instruction booklet, this gave me the basic fundamental parts of the livery I needed...

At first glance, this looked ok but on closer analysis, the bottom of the planet has been cropped.

Using MS Paint again, I grabbed the right hand section of the planet ring, flipped it and attached it to the opposite end...

The planet logo was then coloured yellow using flood fill, the Zanussi lettering, after being sharpened first, had the same treatment.

Finally for the livery I was looking to re-create, I needed the yellow stripe at the bottom. This was created using the autoshapes, it's just a yellow rectangle with a black circle, sized the same as the planet, layered over the top. The planet graphic is then superimposed on top to create this fairly accurate interpretation:

Printed and cut to size, my graphics are designed as wrap-around, ie there is only one seam, it just means that they're a little more tricky to align.

Shiny repainted roof, this one's ready to join the fleet...

My third design was a brewery wagon. As a Dorchester lad, I wanted some local companies and I was aware that Dapol had produced an Eldridge, Pope wagon. I wasn't a huge fan of it and decided use a bit of artistic licence again!

Eldridge, Pope are sadly no longer in existence, this again means that it's difficult finding logos and graphics on the internet. Thankfully I found a high resolution scan of two EP beer mats, after using the same processes to tweak the images as the previous wagons, I had the two most famous EP logos shrunk down to size.

Now for the lettering. Not easy!

The O of Co and the TD of Ltd are usually displayed in Superscript with the full stop underneath.

I spent many hours trawling through font styles to replicate this look before realising that I could actually use any of the fonts in MS office and use the Superscript function. HOWEVER, I also wanted the lettering to appear in an arc, this means using Wordart, and Wordart doesn't accommodate Superscript. To make this work, the Wordart was copied into Paint, the O and TD were cut, shrunk and pasted back into place, with the full stops being moved. 

The green colour scheme I've used is nothing like the Dapol version. EP used many different shades of green over the years, I quite liked this shade.

Finally, the three scrap wagons after restoration:

I've now created 9 new wagons using these designs, I'll probably do some more with the eventual aim of having a whole goods train made up of modified wagons.