Let's Get Involved - Weathering BR 21T MDO Mineral Wagons With Alex Roughsedge

Warbonnet · August 5

Welcome to another of our "Let's Get Involved" series of how-to modelling guides featuring techniques to take our models to another level. Today it is our lovely 21T MDO wagons that are the subject, as Alex Roughsedge captures the rather battered state the real wagons ended up in. Take it away, Alex!

Built between 1950 and 1952, the British Railways 21t MDO wagons were a mainstay of mineral traffic for the best part of 40 years, lasting in some cases until the early nineties. Accurascale’s models are superb renditions straight out of the box, but they’re just too clean! MDOs got utterly filthy in service, some ending up with remarkably little of their original grey colour left. Hopefully, this tutorial will help make your own models just that little bit more prototypical.

Usually, my own weathering methods involve heavy airbrush use, but I know not everybody will have the luxury of an airbrush in their own toolkit. As such, I’ve tried to keep the use of this to a minimum. The airbrush is used solely for varnishing; rattle cans are a perfectly good substitute.

We’ll make a start with the first MDO, B202043. Looking at photos on the internet of the real wagon this model is based on, the weathering is somewhat different to the other two MDOs included in Pack H so we’ll focus solely on this one for the time being.

The very first step here is to give the model an overall coat of matt varnish. I favour Mr Color’s GX113, a lacquer-based formula with UV blocking technology that should prevent any yellowing or fading of the colours over time. I thin this around 50/50 with their own lacquer thinners and apply a generous coat to the model. This gives a nice key for the subsequent weathering, as well as a smooth, predictable surface. Mr Color offer this exact varnish in rattle can form which would be just as good, but any decent matt varnish can be substituted here.

Studying photos of B202043 on Paul Bartlett’s superb Zenfolio page, the wagon appears almost completely dark brown, and has retained very little of its original BR grey after many years of hard work. To my eye, this looks more like heavy dirt than rust as such, and there are what appear to be areas where this dirt has been rubbed away revealing remnants of the grey underneath. More on this a little later. To begin with, a general coat of Vallejo Mecha Color 69.035 ‘Chipping Brown’ was thinned a little with tap water and applied to the areas between the side ribs, taking care to preserve the beautifully applied factory markings. This doesn’t have to be particularly neat, and I only applied a single coat to add to the rough appearance.

The side ribs are significantly cleaner on the real wagon than the areas in between, but these are still pretty grubby. The same Vallejo Chipping Brown colour was now added to the remaining grey areas using a small piece of sponge held in some self-closing tweezers. This is applied in a stippling motion and can create some incredibly convincing chipped paint effects.

This technique nicely blends in the cleaner ribbing but leaves it noticeably cleaner than the rest of the wagon.

It’s time to crack out some oil paints for the remainder of the weathering process. My chosen colours here being: ABT510 ‘Starship Filth’ and ABT240 ‘Cream Brown’ from 502 Abteilung, along with some bog standard ‘Mixing White’ and ‘Lamp Black’ from Winsor & Newton. These were applied to a small piece of cardboard to leech out some of the linseed oil which makes the paints a little easier to use and dry much faster.

I began by mixing the Lamp Black and Mixing White to form a grey somewhat similar to the original BR grey. As mentioned above, the photos of the wagon seem to show some areas where the darker filth has been rubbed away, particularly around the doors, and what looks like the original BR grey is showing through. At least that’s my interpretation anyway. The mixed grey oil paint was applied neat to the model, following the photo references as closely as I could. The advantage of oils here is that these patches could then be blended slightly using white spirit to soften the edges.

At this point, I gave the model another coat of matt varnish to seal the grey patches in so they wouldn’t be affected by the next stage of oils. An alternative here would be to leave the model to dry for 24-48 hours, but who has time for that?! The next step was to apply some neat Starship Filth in a streaking motion down the side of the wagon. Shortly after, neat white spirit on a large brush can be used to further refine these streaks. The beauty of oil paints is they remain adjustable for many hours, giving you full control over any effects you may want to achieve, to the point of being able to completely remove the paint if you’re not happy. Small amounts of other colours can also be added here, particularly the Cream Brown, to add further streaks and rain marks.

At the same time, some oil washes can be added to the underframes and wheel centres. I used mainly Starship Filth here, but feel free to experiment. Wagon underframes ended up all manner of colours so you can really go to town. I applied mine as washes, before using some neat Lamp Black around the axleboxes to represent oil staining.

Once this step was complete, I added a further coat of sealing varnish, however this time I used GX112 gloss.

The reason for the gloss varnish this time was to allow a careful pin wash of Tamiya Black Panel Line Accent Colour to be applied to the nooks and crannies around the bodywork. This should hopefully bring back a little definition to the wagon and create some false shadows. The wash is allowed to run around details and along the side ribs, then once dry, the excess can be wiped away using a cotton bud dampened with White Spirit.

I didn’t go too over the top with the inside of the wagon here, simply opting for an initial all-over wash of Mig Ammo ‘Light Rust Wash’, which was then augmented once dry with ‘Streaking Rust Effects’. The latter can be streaked in a vertical motion up and down the inner sides to give the impression of rust streaks left by rain.

The final step for B202043 was to give it a good final coat of matt varnish. As you can see, the model now looks a million miles away from its original pristine finish, and hopefully much closer to how the real B202043 looked in service.

Moving onto the other two wagons in the pack, B202125 and B202028. Paul Bartlett’s site again also has excellent images of these two wagons. Immediately it can be seen that these two are much rustier in appearance than B202043.

As a result of this, I opted to start with Vallejo Model Color 71.037 ‘Mud Brown’ as a base coat for the rust effects. This was again thinned slightly with tap water and applied to the model in a single coat.

Once dry, the Mig Ammo rust effects were cracked open once more. Similar to the wagon insides, an initial coat of the lighter colour was applied to the brown areas as a wash, before the darker colour was applied over the top and streaked in a downward motion using a large brush and White Spirit.

Chipping Brown was once again applied using the sponge method to the side ribbing, and the top edge of the wagon in varying amounts according to the reference images.

These two wagons feature more refined patches of grey, so here I used Pro Acryl ‘Bright Warm Grey’, a surprisingly good match for the original Accurascale BR Grey. This was applied carefully using a small brush, again following reference images.

Another noticeable feature of these two wagons is the presence of much darker grey patches around the lighter rust areas. Here, neat Starship filth was applied roughly in the areas where these patches occur. There are also visible weld lines on the sides as well. I opted to represent these with thin lines of oil paint, but if you were feeling particularly adventurous then you could carefully scribe these lines in with a needle or scribing tool.

As before, the oil paint is blended and feathered in using White Spirit. The weld lines were softened slightly using this method, before some very slight vertical streaking. As a bonus, this step also helps to blend in the grey patches applied previously.

Perhaps the most curious feature of these particular wagons is a number of odd horizontal lines towards the top of the wagon. I can only begin to speculate on the purpose/reason for these lines – they appear to be above and below the weld lines so are they perhaps some result of the welding process? Maybe they’re simply to denote a fill line? I’m sure someone out there will know.

I absolutely love replicating features like these lines on models as they just elevate it to another level. These were carefully painted on using a small brush and the neat Cream Brown oil paint. Once allowed to dry a little, these were again softened and refine using White Spirit.

Also at this point I gave the interior the same treatment as with the previous model, and applied the black panel line wash too.

The final step was to re-apply some chalk markings present on the real wagon. These are actually represented on the original Accurascale paint job but were obviously obliterated during the initial rust painting. To recreate these, I used a sharp Prismacolor White pencil, however, it must be noted that this has to be done over the final matt coat, and after the matt coat has had a number of hours to dry otherwise the pencil simply gouges away the varnish.

These wagons were incredibly fun to weather. I don’t often try to recreate actual wagons using references, I usually use elements from various sources to create a representation of the subject, so it was a real novelty to try to get these as close to their real-world counterparts as I could.