What a wonderful collection of parcels stock, but that GN milk van, to die for
Now my own efforts I mixed Brown and a Pinky colour and ended up with a Teaky kinda colour, by the time there's a bit of weathering, it'll still end up looking like a dogs dinner.
manna
Some of the Chivers Parcels and other stock are still available from "Five79" now marketed by Matt Chivers. The site is listed under Smaller Suppliers on RMWEB or simply do a search on the Web for Five79.
These are produced in small batches so may not be always available.
The extra long CCT is now in service, although I still have to fit the brake handles, the loco is a renumbered Bachmann V1/3, this loco did spend a few months based at Kings Cross.
This subject sure does come up again and again and my own practice is completely prototypical and as per practice described by Peter Tatlow, using a scaled-down version of the galvanised bin used in the paint shops into which all the paint remnants went = brown. As Peter says, few browns on the LNER looked the same and neither are any of the models.
Here's one I made earlier, representing not just grungy brown but a degree of ageing and loss of gloss which adds its own dowdiness.
Note the dark smoky roof and the lettering showing up because the paint is beginning to chalk.
60117 Bois Roussel wrote:This subject sure does come up again and again and my own practice is completely prototypical and as per practice described by Peter Tatlow, using a scaled-down version of the galvanised bin used in the paint shops into which all the paint remnants went = brown. As Peter says, few browns on the LNER looked the same and neither are any of the models.
Without having the detail knowledge of the learned gentlemen above, I try to make my vehicles look as through they've been in service for a while on a coal-fired railway, and in a country before the clean-air Acts. My post on the colours I use is higher up in this thread, but a finished vehicle is on my modelling thread.... ..here....).
It's surprising how much difference sunlight makes to my indifferent photographic skills.
On a related subject, I had a very wet but interesting day on the NYMR on Friday. I was able to get a good view from the Grosmont footbridge of the roof colours and detail on the NYMR/LNERCA Teak coaches. They varied from newly out-shopped white to a uniformly sodden grey, the latter being very much what I try to reproduce these days. I have a theory that roof colours are disproportionally important on models, because we usually look at them from above. Does this perspective also affect colours in general.
(Sorry for putting so much on Manna's thread - but it seems to have developed this theme which is dear to my heart!)
Last edited by drmditch on Sun Apr 27, 2014 1:09 pm, edited 2 times in total.
G'day all
These parcel vans etc. look great.
They are (well to me) overlooked stock.
Presumably (like BR(S) in my memory) they often ran in Parcel Trains. I can remember a GWR Siphon G amongst Southern stock at Redhill and a blue Gresley Pigeon van on a Parcel train at Woking. If the common user policy operated for NPCS, then one could use trains of mixed origin stock on any model railway.
Parcels/luggage vans do seem to have been largely common user in the BR era. I've only really looked hard at the East Anglian area (for Thurston/Wickham Market) and not really later than the end of the 1950s, but one of the striking things is how common the ex-SR PMV and ex-LMS 42' BG (among others) were very quickly. I'm sure the same must have been true in other regions as well. There are plenty of pictures of 'foreign' vans in parcels/stock workings on the net (and a long-running thread on RMWeb as well).
Steve, can you explain the phrase 'to chalk' for paint? It's not something I've read/heard before.
'Chalking' is a term used to describe one of the ways in which paint or varnish finishes deteriorate.
Best analogy is to older car body paint finishes - especially lighter blues and reds, which not only faded but then began to powder, or chalk, feeling dry and dusty and beginning to come off on the hand if rubbed over. Often because no-one had ever bothered to give them a decent wax job or quite simply because the binder and fillers were separating. The same can happen to building exterior paint finishes over time, if they don't flake off first!
I mixed Brown and a Pinky colour and ended up with a Teaky kinda colour, by the time there's a bit of weathering, it'll still end up looking like a dogs dinner. 
