Bring on the doors

Most of the modelling time since the appearance of the tail lamp renders has been spent experimenting and baking the textures for the 102t bogie tanker. Work commitments at the moment mean there's no access to a pc with RailWorks installed to check the appearance so it felt best not to show any of the progress until the wagon and textures are actually in the simulator.

For a bit of a change tonight we've had a play with the VDA van and have been rendering the high poly doors onto their low poly siblings and adding some colour to check out how they appear. The image above is a quick render of the baked textures for the doors brought back into the modelling programme to see what they look like with a few other parts unhidden to bring the doors into context.

This really is a bit of experimentation with two liveries and associated locations of lettering. Perhaps we could justify it by saying the wagon has been damaged and a couple of doors have been salvaged from a withdrawn example ....

Protecting the rear

It's been a bit quiet of late due to pressures of the day job and the needs of real life. However, there's still been a chance for a bit of modelling in between and the time has been used creating some of the little details that bring things to life.

There's no real surprise that one of these little details is the thing every train should have at the back to prove it's all still there and to protect the train when stopped. One of a Signalman's duties were to ensure that trains passing his 'box carried a tail lamp and as such the section was not obstructed.

The tail lamp is one of the things we felt really should have some extra care lavished on it as it will be appearing in a lot of stock packs over the coming months and would need to be in keeping with the rolling stock. That said there were some lines that had to be drawn to keep the resources sensible, so if things look a bit lumpy don't forget that this is probably the largest you're ever going to see the shape!

It's quite surprising when you consider how important a tail lamp was, the number of simers and modellers that will happily run their trains without a tail lamp, luckily that won't be a problem with our stock.

Would beer help?

Ok, it's a light hearted post this one, and nothing to do with the current releases for Project East Coast. Then again it's been a week where beer could have been handy at times.

Not much to show on the tanker and friends as most the time from the last post seems to have taken up with driving around the North West and various bits of admin. to keep HMRC and friends happy.

Anyway on a more RailWorks related note. While doing all the boring stuff I stumbled on this render of a model that was being tinkered with a while ago. The model is one of the last batch of four-wheel grain hoppers that were originally built with vacuum brakes for BRT in the 1970s. With the demise of vacuum braked trains the wagons from the earlier batches were withdrawn but a number from the final batch were converted to airbrakes and gained the striking Grainflow livery. Although originally used for grain (including trips to breweries), with the decline in this traffic they found use on other traffics including alumina to Fort William.

A grain wagon pack has been at the back of our minds for Project East Coast so these wagons can run with their much larger companions. Naturally it's one of those things for the future, but it will happen.