Thatched Cottages and Auto Trailers

Well October is nearly finished and it is time for another posting. I am being challenged painting a second hand already assembled Dapol OO scale Thatched Cottage The challenge is primarily in getting the effect of the dark timber framing and the whitewashed wattle and daub to be distinct (as they are in real life and probably any model that is not one piece of moulded plastic with raised sections to represent the framing). At this time I am working with paint and brush and not having the best of success.I am hoping that a coat of white over where I got carried away with the black and then using a black marker will give better results. I do not know enough about airbrushing to say that it would be a solution.

Meanwhile I have gone auto trailer mad. With a Father's day gift of a brand new Hornby 14xx, the perfect passenger rolling stock to go with it is a cream and chocolate auto trailer, as seen here with GWR 1450 in the perfect pairing I am hoping to emulate in model form. Hornby makes runs of the model in BR Maroon from time to time but I don't feel equipped to do a repaint (both with respect to tolling and skill). So an eBay purchase of a second hand Dapol (who inherited the plastic moulds from Airfix) auto trailer in the GWR colours for my intended modelling period has been accompanied by a detailing kit intended for the same model and a reference book about GWR auto trailers for the period I intend to model. Oh, and did I mention that postage on one book seemed a bad portion of the total cost? So I added two other books that feature stations on the Exe Valley line. The book cost to postage cost was still not brilliant, but beat the initial ratio of the postage costing as much as 2/3 as the book price. This seems to be the price of getting hold of what are becoming more rare and specialist materials.

While trains and railways are still with us and carrying bulk materials more efficiently than any other mode of transport, they are not what they once where to society. And of course steam trains and all that went with them have not been part of daily life for many decades now, more than half a century in some countries. While there are heritage railways and preserved examples of the steam age (some still running even!) and people who model these machines of the past, the market for source material on specific subjects must be quite small. Thus it becomes a case of seller's market and what the market can bear, thankfully the Aussie dollar is fairly strong against the English pound at the moment.

The photo for this post shows how bad my attempts thus far at painting the thatched cottage have been. Red outlines show the worst areas, though to be realistic, the whole thing could be one big circle at the moment. How will it turn out? Stay tuned for future posts :-) Next on my modelling calendar is getting the Christmas tree layout up and running, also adding the trees and then putting "snow" on the whole scene.