Having completed an awful lot of the house redecorating, I have finally had a decent amount of modelling time recently. I have been managing to paint fairly regularly on the weekends and the occasional work day, meaning that some of the wagons and locomotives in the paint boxes are slowly being finished off. The first wagon I have recently completed was the Parkside SR 25T Pill Box brake van in departmental olive green livery. I started building this wagon in Christmas 2014 and finished building it in 2021! The wagon is painted with Railmatch enamels and I used RailTec transfers. These were all sealed in with matt and satin varnish coats; the varnish coast were slightly rushed and consequently there are a couple of areas of the finish that niggle me. However, from normal viewing distance it looks fine and I am pleased to have started my engineers train in O gauge.
The other really pleasing thing, is that I have finally set up my O gauge layout again to continue the detailing. I had to put this away a little over a year ago, as we were starting some seriously house renovations and it was tucked into the corner of a room and covered with a dust sheets. Of course the dust got everywhere, but the dust sheets came off yesterday and I gave it a good hoover. I plugged it all in and I am delighted (and slightly relieved) it all worked fine. The layout runs all the way across the lounge, but working at a slight angle it all fits across the lounge. So after a good track clean, I can finally run some trains again. It was fantastic to see the class 25 and 03 pottering around the layout - the both sounded and looked great. The plan for today is to run some passenger stock to get a feel for the dimensions of the track plan and then get stuck into the layout scenery building. I have to build an embankment by the tunnel, alongside finishing the quay water area and then I will install the backscenes. There is also a new turntable fiddle yard to wire up and get working. So there will be plenty of glue and mess across the weekend - which sounds great to me!
