murphaph

Be careful with t cut and cotton buds however. I've seen it have disastrous effects on certain RTR finishes because the numbering is sometimes very hard wearing compared to the underlying paint, which then starts to come off/turn really shiny while the numbering sometimes even stays put. If the 121s use the same numbering technique as the 071s I can say how I have removed them....using a cocktail stick and nothing else. They can be scraped off by using the sharp point. Nevertheless a slight outline trace remains but it's completely flat IIRC. I was respraying so did not care about it but the numbers are quite tough. I suspect it would have been very difficult to remove them with tcut to be honest. At around 9 mins you can see t cut disaster here:

If anyone is looking for a full rake from the original series, I bought two full rakes back then and would be willing to part with one of them so I can grab a rake of these new ones instead. Feel free to send me a PM if interested.

Thank you all for your kind words.

Excellent. That's what you want, nice bit of caked on cement. Is it real cement?

Easily my favourite wagons to weather so far. Hardly a different combination of reds and browns couldn't be found on the prototype during the 90s. They were well and truly unloved by the end. Yes the wheels are still masked as I have to wait until everything is really dry before applying a top coat of matt varnish. As a matter of course I am regauging each wagon as it gets weathered. Strange glare is the light reflecting off the back of my phone I think the jury is still out on as to whether or not the 48 tonners were ever loaded like this. The restriction bars had definitely been removed as there is photographic evidence of briquettes being loaded in those centre bins. I assume it would have happened with fertiliser too and anyway rule 1 lol. The obligatory before and after

If anyone wants the RPSI 3 pack I still have access to one for a much more reasonable amount

When was the meat factory on the Grand Canal in Dublin closed? That would have probably been rail served as well one would imagine. If I'm not mistaken it was built on the former DSER carriage works site.

Cheers Rich, yeah it seems like when repairing the sheeting they painted them before screwing them to the door frames, possibly because they knew that they'd corrode prematurely if they didn't do it like that. At least that is what it looks like to me in pics I've seen. I've also painted some of the cross members and end panels in bauxite red as there are pics of these repairs as well. I just clear coated the whole wagon in preparation for the weathering as it's coloured plastic not a painted finish and the weathering just rubs off unless I put a clear coat down first. The handy thing is, you only need to make up one bauxite red mix and then just apply slightly thicker and thinner coats to the different doors. The brown plastic slightly showing through from below then results in different shades of bauxite red by default. Kind of pre-shading without any effort. This then represents repairs that have been carried out at different stages in the past. The brighter the red, the more recent the repair. It doesn't show up all that well in the pic as the effect is very subtle. Anyway, that's the fiddly work done on these three. The rest is just washes and fairly indiscriminate grime with the airbrush.

It looks like some of these wagons carried warning flashes for OHLE but this was rare, right? Was it just the 48 tonner ones or did the non-upgraded ones get them as well the odd time? Anyone got any more pics of the ends?

You could just spray the green ones white Cathal. They are easy to remove. The load limiting bars in the centre bays need a little bit more force to remove but unless you are a clumsy oaf it's trivial to remove the loads. I am very much looking forward to these. I think they are still my favourite IRM wagons (so far!). Funnily enough I started weathering my original ones yesterday:

Ace. I love the faint traces of rust on the sleepers where the chairs would have been.

In reality any gloss finish viewed from far enough away appears matt. As we view our stock from a scale 200 metres or more away it is more realistic when it has a matt or at least satin finish IMO.

Give it a go. You may find you are good at weathering!

Lovely stuff. Is the P&T van the same kit as the Heuston tool van?

Welcome! You should reach out to @WRENNEIRE or Chris Dyer (https://www.chrisdyerfairs.co.uk/), both have sourced out of production items for me in the past, and see if they have 018 still. In my opinion you should get A30 while it's still available and weather it or have it weathered to that filthy bleached state. I wouldn't let any loco slip through my hands if it ran in my time period and was available retail. It will never be released in a weathered state. IRM don't do factory weathering for a good reason. If you don't pick A30 up I suspect you'll be kicking yourself over it later.

In for a penny, in for a pound... Many of the Taras exhibit this "dribble pattern" down the sides. Not sure what causes it, probably overfilling around the holes near the top. I'm not done with these but I feel they are heading in the right direction. I sprayed the dust coating over the top having tried to simply apply a wash. It pooled in all the wrong places and didn't look right at all. That's the good thing about weathering with enamels...you can just wipe it all off an hour later and start again. Acrylics aren't as forgiving.

It seems to be a file size problem @BosKonay. A pic I take on my phone is typically 3.5MB. The same pic gets saved to Google photos at around 1MB. If I download the pic from photos and attach it here (all on my phone) it works. The 3.5MB original will not work. See screenshot:

I've gone for a rustier top side this time. Found a pic of a wagon in similar condition.

I think it was a generic server error, nothing specific. I will try again tomorrow using the exact same image file I used from the laptop. Google compresses the files but the originals were all well under 8MB.

I'm not sure on the former but definitely after ca. 1995 some time. On the latter I have no clue whatsoever. Maybe @Arran would know that?

I've mustered up the courage to weather my first IRM wagon and I'm glad I did. Having studied several pics from the early to mid 90's it seems brown rusty bogies under dirty bauxite chassis were the order of the day. The later black bogies with green and blue details are definitely wrong for my chosen era anyway. I decided to remove the kinematic coupling before spraying but I don't think I'll do that again. Too fiddly putting it back together. I ended up using a pair of sharp cocktail sticks to manipulate the tiny springs into place. Lord knows how I didn't lose them. Pics to follow. Can't upload them from my phone right now.

I'm afraid I'm getting the same 200 error on pics no larger than 4.2MB. Anyone else having this problem? Can't submit pics from my phone.

You're too kind Dave. It was nothing really and we owe you just as many if not more thanks as well for having us! Now where's that blushing emoji when you need it.....

It's a fair bit of expense to go to, producing the tooling for these and paying for their assembly, just to hand out as souvenirs, though I suppose in relation to the total contract value it's buttons. Nice touch all the same. I wonder how many of each would typically be produced. Would these be made by established model makers in China I wonder?