Plastic noodling

Roof complete, I took the September 2014 issue of Model Rail as my guide for finishing off the Downes box. Looking at the photos of a very similar box he'd built, I took my cues from this - the plan is to produce an "Alan Downes" box, not necessarily a prefect scale replica of a real one.

According to the magazine, ornate bargeboards were fitted but these looked horribly complicated to cut out of plasticard so I opted for much simpler versions based on a prototype photo. Strips of 40 thou plasticard did the job. A little microstrip along the top added a touch of detail.

Finials were carved from 2mm square plastic rod. I know castings would be nicer, or at least look exactly the same, but I was enjoying this noodling around with plastic bits, something very much on the style of Downes.

Incidentally, I did most of this while watching the film Battleship, not the greatest film in the world but who knew you could handbrake turn a full sized vessel just by dropping the anchor at speed?

Anyway, along the front we have what I take to be a safety bar to protect signalmen hanging out of the windows. A 1mm diameter plastic rod with slices of tune stuck to small rectangles of 40 thou did this. I think the magazine shows real handrail knobs but I didn't have enough in stock and wasn't keen to buy a load in for this job. I suppose the handrail is 0.3mm too fat but my feeling is that these bars are often on the chunky side in real life. Possibly you need plenty of metal to retain a rotund signalman leaning out to exchange a token with a passing engine driver.

The drainpipe is more tube, cut and glued to shape. I love working in plastic for this sort of job as using solvent, joints are pretty much instant and after a light sanding, any imperfections can be smoothed away with the same liquid.

All in all, a very pleasant way to spend a few hours. Little worry about perfect prototype fidelity and lots of impressionistic modelling.

Slating the roof

The most obvious job required on the signal box is finishing off the roof. For help with this, I turned to Alan Downes nemesis and another master modeller - Iain Robinson.

Some time ago, he wrote a superb piece on his blog covering slate for the roof. If there's too much reading for you, print out this beautifully illustrated guide, which tells you most of what you need to know and looks brilliant on the railway room wall at the same time.

Iain produced a sheet of pre-marked out Countess sized slates and a quick e-mail saw me the proud owner of the file for this, albeit in 4mm scale. Telling my printer to run a couple of copies off at 175% sorted this out for my O gauge building.

Each tile was stuck to the cardboard roof with PVA glue from a pound shop - a big bottle that will do fine for this sort of job. After a while, picking a tile up with tweezers from the pile of pre-chopped ones became quick and easy. Not unpleasant either - I did the job while watching The Ipcress File on TV. You need a nice simple, repetitive job like this while trying to follow a complex plot and enjoy the excellent archive footage of London.

Painting slates is something I've always struggled with. Picking out individual ones never looks right to me so I cheated here and whacked a coat of Humbrol 69, Tank Grey (Update: Humbrol 67, not 69!) , over the lot and then worked talcum powder into the nearly dry surface followed by a coat of Testors Dullcote.

Wooden signal box

Time for a model that is special to me. As a youthful modeller, the articles I really enjoyed reading were those written by Alan Downes. His buildings really seemed to capture the look and feel of the real thing without all the faffing around with fiddly detail. While the rest of that edition of Railway Modeller might well have long since headed for the bin, the chances are I could dig out this bit from my box files.

Which is why when Chris Neverd asked me if I wanted a 7mm scale signal box made by Alan, I couldn't really turn it down. OK, there's none of his favourite Pyruma fire cement - the stone for all his stone walls - I'm happy to bag a bit of the mans work.

The box is mostly plasticard. It's not a model of any specific location, but then that was never the Downes style, more generic GWR structure. Attractive but wrong enough to annoy purists. That's probably why I like it.

There's work to do of course, but that makes it more interesting for me. Very few modellers produce anything that I wouldn't want to tinker with to add my own stamp, although a Guy R Williams loco would be left well alone!