Black oiling locomotives

Hi all,

Just a quick post today. I had in my mind a way to get a black oiled appearance on a steam locomotive which involved using Tamiya Line Accent. This is was something I wanted to try for some time before actually doing it properly today.

What is black oiling?

Black steam locomotives were often 'spruced' up with a layer of black oil to give the locomotive a glossy finish. This was something commonly done with locomotives used for enthusiast specials or even by some depots as a regular occurrence in the steam era.

Straight panel line is poured into an airbrush and sprayed at around 25psi. When spraying, ensure you're not spraying too much product otherwise you can get runs. A light spray just to give a basic emphasis over the paint to darken it ever so slightly as black oil was used for. You can build up coats just to get the final finish.

Here are some photos of the finished loco.

Cheers

Painting the AC state car

Hi all,

I recently commenced building a Lloyds AC state car. Easily, one of the nicest kits I have come across. It's a theme with the old milky bar kits how simple and well thought out they are.

The kit went together fairly straightforward, with no major hiccups. The end handrails and etching for the end platform are a bit of a prick, but that's a given with the nature of the kit.

The carriage was dismantled to be painted, with the body and underframe being primed separately. I use Tamiya fine surface primer, a very forgiving primer to use I've found.

Once everything was primed, the underframe was hit with XF1 flat black from Tamiya. I'll have to redo it a bit later, but it's not an issue right now.

I picked up some Tamiya XF9 Hull Red and XF55 Deck Tan to paint the car. The whole carriage was painted in the Hull Red, and then left to dry. A mixture of 10mm, 3mm, 1mm and 0.7mm masking tape was used to mask off to paint the cream. What a prick of a job.

Anyway, here is where we are at now. I plan to fit some Casula 2AA bogies and lower it a little, but not today. I do plan to add the rest of the lining at a later date...

Cheers