With my latest attempts at creating GC-esque carriage stock from RTR and Ratio offerings producing results, my first tries (a rake of matchboarded 1911 mainline carriages) started to look a bit tatty. In addition, since first creating them new information has come to light, suggesting I made the matchboarding too heavy in appearance and got the teak wrong- I went for a generally lighter hue, whilst photographs and paintings seem to suggest the matchboarding should be nigh-on invisible and the hue should be much darker.

So I went and had a bit of an experiment earlier this week on one of them.

The first thing to do was to remove my original paper overlays, which was done using a saucer of water, a stiff brush and a decent scalpel. I tried to save the transfers- of which more anon- and after an hour or so of patient cutting, scratching and scraping I managed to get the carriage body back to its original state, or something approaching it.

I then took some white putty and smeared it along the cantrail strip and below the waist of the carriage. Once it had gone off I sanded it down. At this point I used a sharp scalpel blade to carve the doors back into the carriage body.

I then took a very dark brown enamel and wetted it down using white spirit, and gave the carriage body three coats of this. It came out looking as though it had been hit by a train of cocoa powder...

I then took a lighter brown enamel and very sparingly worked my way over the body, two or three body panels at a time. This is almost drybrushed on, what I actually did was to put a nice even coat on and then wipe it away with a piece of rag. The result is that in some areas it sticks, others it is removed entirely and in between you get a nice effect of sheen. I then worked in just a suggestion of matchboarding by varying the direction of the brush strokes.

At this stage I attempted to salvage the old transfers, by wetting the old paper overlays and worrying at them with a scalpel and brush. It didn't work. The paper disintegrated to the point that the only thing holding it together was the transfer, which then itself disintegrated... Ahh...

There was only one thing to do and that was to competely replace the transfers. I think I might just have barely enough on the two sheets of HMRS LNER gold insignia in my spares box to do all four carriages. If not, well, I placed an order for another sheet last night.

The carriage was then varnished in my own fashion using watered-down PVA glue.

The final step was to try to make the matchboarding just a bit more obvious. I didn't want to scratch into the carriage body again and it struck me that what in essence you're looking for is just a simple dark line from the waist down to the solebar. As it turns out, a ballpoint pen will do this perfectly!

So there we have it, at the third iteration. An easy and fairly quick way of getting GC-esque matchboard stock from Mainline/ Bachmann LMS 57' carriages.