BRM Magazine; Vandalised Coaches

Somewhat surprisingly, I was in BRM twice this month! After the goods sheds, another project with a bit of vandalism and wreckage. This time; vandalised coaches. The brief was to use some transfers to replicate broken windows on the coaches, then there were some more transfer sheets with bits of graffiti. My brief was to use them, and do some more graffiti too.

Inspiration; this rake of old parcels stock in Hellifield yard. They've been there for as long as I can remember, slowly decaying. Nicely accessible though, as they're unfenced when the cafe car park is open.

The coaches I'd be using for the project- a bit of a mix of eras, potentially a problem. The transfers were designed for Mk.1 coaches, so I needed to use them, but graffiti is a bit of a modern issue. In the end I decided to model a modern-era rolling stock restoration yard, and assume the Mk.1's were upgraded mainline vehicles. Two of them are those magazine partwork coaches that were being sold about 20 years ago.

First tests of the weathering process, using some old toy train/starter wagons to get some practise in. 

I wanted to avoid any problems with I.P or copyright, so whilst a bit generic, the graffiti is based off my own artwork and characters. More on this shortly...

For the shoot, to save time I renovated the depot scene from the Burneside-esque tramway project, adding some new buildings from another scrap Hornby Diesel Depot.

Test-fit of the Railtec transfers.

With the dark livery of the coaches, I realised I needed to paint some base layers in white acrylic. Citadel paints as usual.

All looking a bit clean and too bold here, for long-term stored coaches.

They looked rather better with weathering; downward-streaking with cotton buds and kitchen towels, with various washes of watered-down browns, greens, and greys.

Though the transfers weren't designed for the longer windows on the Mk.4 coach, I was able to combine some of them. They ended up a bit creased, but I reckoned I could play that off as a problem with the protective film layer a lot of modern coach windows have.

Oh yes, the artwork. As I said, I wanted to avoid copyright infringement, so used my own artwork. Arf the husky appears in several places (as he has been since about 2002!), the names of the graffiti artists are either nicknames my foster-daughters go by, or in the case of Rhyd a character from another project I've worked on, and Teal was a notorious, if mysterious, graffiti tagger at my first secondary school.

And then there's Hallie.

Robot Girl From The Future!  There's a proper explanation of her in the earlier Medical Monday post on the leg break.

Cartoon versions of her, her ever-present (and somewhat long-suffering) teddybear, and her male counterpart, Hal, appear throughout my work planner, and I've started sneaking them into the BRM projects too. 

Having incorporated Hallie on the practise diesel shunter, and her and her robot-brother playing teddybear-tug-of-war on one of the tankers, I thought a prominent big piece of one of them on the otherwise rather plain Mk.4 might look good.

In the fictional world of these shoots, Hallie and Hal are pop-culture characters, so the idea is one of the taggers has painted her. The artwork in question, "Caught Ya Napping" is inspired by a famous, early piece of full-height carriage graffiti from the New York El Trains in the 1980's.

And that's that. Something a bit different, and a little darker in tone perhaps than some of the projects I've done lately. A nice change in subject matter to my recent fare though, and rather fun, and an excuse to do something arty.

Aaaaaand in the mag.

 

BRM Magazine; Goods Sheds in N

An interesting month for me with British Railway Modelling, I have two thematically-similar articles in the same mag! So today, part one...

This was the final of the first round of projects BRM asked me to do, this time 2025; building, personalising, comparing and contrasting two different N Scale Goods Sheds. One traditional plastic kit by Ratio, one laser-cut wood and card kit by Ancorton Models.

The Ratio one; a reasonably old, but very well designed and made, kit.

It went together without much fuss.

Paint mixed up from Citadel Acrylics and weathering washes.

Lovely glazing.

I didn't want 'just' a goods shed, so turned to the KWVR (naturally) for inspiration. Oakworth shed with the 4F on display...

... and down the line, Bahamas Locomotive Society museum at Ingrow. I thought something like this would be nice.

A balcony and interior was cobbled together from the kit sprue and scraps, with a diecast Lone Star Locos Jinty, garishly repainted. How much of this would be visible, I was unsure, but the plan was for a big glass fronted door.

Loosely inspired by this.

Again, using scrap and sprue.

The platform-side of the shed, with home-made posters (from some of my older projects).

The Ancorton Models shed, built at work in the mornings before shift. Mainly because it could be done with PVA, the fumes of which didn't disturb my fellow Technicians in the office.

Lovely card details for the window frames.

Having done several upbeat and jolly projects, I went a little more grotty with this one, and wanted to model the building looking a little neglected and run-down.

The idea was an old railway goods shed, repurposed into a lorry depot with new doors and things, then subsequently abandoned.

And grafiti-covered, A few in-jokes with the latter (as clearly I'm no Banksy). A My Little Pony for Younger Child, Arf is in there on the right of course -my cartoon wolves get everywhere- and it's tagged by Hallie, who's my Robot-Child at the Day Job in my simulated hospital ward as she's a bit of a rebellious hooligan at the moment due to some bugs in her programming.

Needing a header pic with both in shot, I turned again to Ingrow, KWVR for inspiration, though inverted. In reality the preserved railway is at the lower level, the former GNR was higher up, but the two station sites really were quite close together.

Bricked up tunnel. West Yorkshire is full of bits like this, where the Midland and the Great Northern fought a pointless battle, squeezing their railways through the valleys and mill-towns.

Possibly went a bit over the top with the greenery.

Well-kept yard up the top, overgrown one with the remains of old inset-rails below.

Another civilised indoor shoot!

Inspired by the old Crossley Evans Scrapyard down the road from me, where they had until recently a pair of Ruston 88's buried in greenery. All scrapped and gone just before I started work on the project so I couldn't get a prototype pic for the blog, but I could at least model a representation of it. I had a 3D printed body acquired years ago from Shapeways, which seemed to fit the bill.

And here in the mag- it's always a bit of a mystery to me the way print schedules work, I produced this project as one of the first four I did way back last Spring, and here it is in early 2026 after lots of pieces I've done in the meantime.

Once more, hats-off to the team, who've made it look awesome on the page.

Another fun project, not the sort of thing I'd have done off my own bat as it were, and the fist bit of N gauge I'd done in a while.

Garden Railway Saturday; Poppleton Community Railway Nursery

Just a short post today; the next instalment of our 32mm scale project, and a trip to the ever-brilliant Poppleton Community Railway Nursery in York for plants.

We've been coming here for nearly a decade, off and on. It's a former British Rail, before that British Railways, before that London-North-Eastern-Railway, plant nursery. Here, they once grew the flowers and greenery which would be despatched to stations all over the network. In later years it fell into ruin, before being resurrected by a volunteer group who are bringing it back to life bit by bit, every year. 

We needed some plants for the garden line, and what better than a garden centre which has a working narrow gauge railway running around the place?

As I say, we've been coming here for years. I'd heard about this place years ago, and visited with Younger Child on something of a whim. An afternoon of cake and plants did the trick, we've been back pretty much every year excepting the Plaguey Times.

So yes; another piece in the mag, albeit one with no actual modelling. We planted up a lot of what we bought here on the visit, there's still more awaiting the Spring and the finalising of the scenic work. Should be some actual model-making coming up soon, we've just nailed 4 projects in the last fortnight, which should be coming up some time soon.