Loco weathering clues from classic railway films
WE’RE so used to seeing immaculate steam locomotives on the main line and heritage railways nowadays that it’s hard to imagine them with cylinder and valve casings that are sheets of rust, nameplates gone, steam leaking everywhere and so filthy in overall appearance that it’s impossible even to read their cabside numbers.
The experience of witnessing this long, sad decline in the 1960s was so traumatic that I prefer to forget it to this day, and would never dream of actually modelling such a tragic period. Even at their zenith however, steam engines were never as uniformly spotless as the restored survivors that streak across Britain might suggest – and incidentally many diesel locomotives also made very sorry sights towards the end of their days, the ‘Western’ diesel-hydraulics, for example.
Research
In a modelling context, of course, the extremes of absolute cleanliness, absolute filth and everything in-between brings the subject of model railway weathering into focus. Therefore, in an effort to show locomotives as
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