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...
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