Thursday, November 15, 2012

Freshly painted P

Clean P Class

Fresh out of the paint shops, the little P Class is looking rather lovely. The contrast between a satin finished body and matt painted smokebox is particularly pleasing.

The satin is Humbrol satin black, varnished once the transfers have been applied. Looking at my stock of the later, I dug out some old Pressfix which looked about right and for a change, were free of annoying transfer film.

31325 was chosen as the number simply because I found this picture on the web:

Photograph: Mike Morant collection from the Southern e-Group website.
 
It looked about as dirty as I wanted my model to be and while the idea of painting a full pre-grouping livery had crossed my mind, in my hands that was just the path to a world of pain. Anyway, I have far more use for a BR engine. Except if I want to run it on Hellingly anyway but I can live with that.
 
One important point to note is that 31325 received its BR crests early and so got the version where the lion (or ferret) faced the front of the engine on both sides. At some point the international heraldry overlords pointed out to BR that if they wanted to do this, they had to register two different heraldic devices. BR couldn't be bothered to fill in the forms twice for this and anyway, it halved the numbers of transfer designs required so they decided that the beasts head would always face left.

2 comments:

Chris Ford said...

You skipped neatly over the section on pick-ups. Bad Phil..

Phil Parker said...

I'm to modest to mention them. That and all I have a paxolin plate in the bottom with some lengths of phospher bronze soldered to it. These are then bent in wierd ways util they touch the back of the wheels and (hopefullY) don't touch the live chassis. It all looks to horrible to photograph but sort of works.