Milk tanker - first wagon for the milk train

Modelling railways in North Devon during the 1970s means that certain types of freight wagons are a necessity, principally china clay wagons and milk tankers.  Barnstaple Junction was handling both types of traffic throughout the 1970s, with the milk traffic stopping sometime in the late 1970s and clay traffic in the early 1980s.  So in preparation for getting the Charlton layout ready for its first exhibition I have made a start on these wagon types.  The first wagon out of the paint works is a milk tanker.  This is the ready to run Dapol offering, which has been much lambasted in the modelling community.  The underframe is rather crude, with the wagon seemingly somewhat a generic representation of a myriad of different types of wagon.  I opted for the weathered version as a first attempt.  The crude underframe and generic representation of the wagon does not bother me too much, although if a decent kit was available for this wagon I would certainly prefer to build my own.  However, with time pressing I am more than happy to convert RTR stock.  Anyhow, the finish on the wagon was genuinely awful!  The weathering revealed paint patches everywhere (caused by spraying over the finished wagon) with the tanker itself having mould lines clearly visible.

  

The out of the box finish.  Masking of the weathered finish is clearly visible.

So the first job on unpacking the wagon was to dismantle the wagon, which did require a little bit of pressure (Dapol seem to use some form of superglue to make these) and tidy up the various components.  Fitting the 3 link coupling was painful and required chopping away some of the chassis and supergluing the 3 link coupling in place.  However, after a few hours work the wagon was ready to enter the paint works.

The wagon ready for painting, after fitting couplings and sanding off the mould lines.

Close up showing the underframe, with a cut out made for inserting of the 3 link coupling.  This has been glued in place.

Given the variation in the original finish by Dapol, combined with the additional sanding of the worst offending mould lines, the surface for painting was highly variable.  This automatically meant that the wagon would have to be pretty heavily weathered to blend this all together.  However, some web perusing revealed this not to be a problem, as most of these wagons were absolutely filthy in the 1970s.  Various shades of weathered black, rust, sleeper grime, matt white and underframe dirt were applied to the wagon. The various components were then varnished before reassembly.  

Finished milk tanker posing on Charlton.

Although the underframe is pretty crude, I did try to bring it to life a little, through the use of different colours and highlighting certain details such as the axle boxes.  Overall, I am pretty happy with this.  Yes it is a crude wagon, but with a bit of work I think it can pass off as a milk tanker - at least for now.  So that is one down - and three left to go!  Hopefully the milk train will not take as long as my parcels train to complete!