Northern Lights?

A quick walk out at dusk last night found this standard dia 1/507 20T brake van with a full set of lamps for an unfittted train on the rear of a local trip working.

Taking a Railfreight Brake

Ok, the plan was to get Railfreight flame red and grey livery on the dia. 1/507 brake van for RailWorks and then get the models out to the testers.

What actually happened was the livery was applied and in the final stages of tweaking when an idea popped into my head - 'It might be a good idea to add side lamps for working trains without continuous brake'. The results can be seen above!

At the present time the side lamps have holding textures in place so the flat appearance and red lens will disappear in future along with the test coupling. The next modelling session should see the lamps baked and given proper textures and the coupling sorted too so these can go off to the testers while final versions of the VDAs are compiled.

Basically Bauxite Brake

Ok with a bit of yellow too!

The base textured dia 1/507 brake van with through air and vacuum pipes (TOPS code CAR) in bauxite livery with yellow patches is ready for a trip to the testers before a bit of dirtying up.

One thing that has become apparent while applying these textures is that no two examples were quite the same. What we see here is an aggregate version that captures the spirit of the vans.

First Coats of paint for the Brake Van

After a couple of entertaining sessions tweaking mapping and realising that no two prototypes are painted the same this freshly painted dia. 1/507 brake van was spotted slipping past Darlington.

The texture is still a layout version at the moment with generally flat colours and some needing a bit more tweaking, but it's always nice to see the model coming to life.

Car Carrier in game

With both the VDA vans and the CAR brake van off with the testers and out of bounds, the last couple of sessions have been devoted to making some more progress with the Newton Chambers Car Carrier which is now into RailWorks and being taken for a first spin.

Chocolate Box

A fairly large number of VDA vans gained white painted roofs when assigned to chocolate traffic for Rowntrees between their factories and depots. It's thought the coat of pain was applied to reflect some of the heat away in a similar way to refrigerated containers and meat vans in the past.

In this shot we can see a maroon liveried van from the lot fitted with experimental suspension. What has become apparent is the wide variations in the way each livery was applied to different vans, the maroon buffers being quite surprising.

This is still a quite flat textured version ready for testing to check everything is where it should be before the grime brushes come out!

Baked Brake

By request here's a screenshot of the baked dia 1/507 Brake Van in game.

There are a few issues in evidence at the moment that need to be sorted along with the high vis coupling!

We're back ...

Sorry about the quiet spell - an ISP issue has meant no internet access for over three weeks and there's only so much you can get away with at work ;-)

Anyway, one of the jobs that's been done while I lurked in the stone age was getting the master textures on to the VDA vans. The maroon versions still need some tweaks but this virtually ex-works version was spotted at Darlington a few moments ago.

It looks like the van has already carried a couple of interesting loads judging by the warning diamond and remains of another that's been removed. Once you have them in your possession you'll be able to choose which warnings are shown along with a Carlisle Currock sticker if the mood takes you.