These wagons are standard Hornby and the only modifications are the painted wheels and my coupling mods. The spills on the tanks are ‘watercolour pencil’, not white, but light grey. These are great for trial and error, if you don’t like it, wipe it of with a damp rag!

After photo research I realised most were quite dirty by the end of the 60’s. I did find attempts at some ‘token cleaning’ so I replicated that on one wagon. This is a rake of eight wagons.

This rake is more akin to the Western Region I believe. My only recollection of milk trains in my area of East Anglia was a very dirty J15 with a couple of full brakes and one or two tanks.

Not much to say about these wagons, standard Heljan Dogfish with a Hornby Shark, lightly weathered. Both great models, only painted wheels and my coupling mods.

After studying the few photo’s of the insides of empty wagons, I tried to replicate them. I have to say that there are plenty of pictures of dogfish in all conditions, but very few of the insides, so some guesswork was needed.

This rake is really late 60’s, early 70’s. Six Dogfish and one Shark.

This is the second of my 60’s pick up freights, and this one is more at home in the late 60’s spilling over to the early seventies. This rake is eight wagons long and features the three ‘blues’ grain wagons, converted chassis from my swap with the cement tanks.

This is the first of many coal trains that I will post, it is also the shortest by far. This train is made up of five coal hoppers and a brake van. I have modelled them in the 1960’s, but again it could be stretched a bit. Although I did see this type of wagon, my local station did not have ‘coal drops’ for bottom discharge. This type of wagon was used more at coal concentration depots rather than in local goods yards.

These wagons are loaded and you may be surprised to know that I do not use real coal or any substitutes, I used OO & O gauge ballast!!!!!  After much experimenting and trying to break real coal, screen and sort it into grades, I always ended up with more dust than the right sized coal. As I say above, my answer was ballast. When you buy it, it comes in a fairly even size, it glues well with PVA and accepts paint well. I simply make an insert with whatever humps or bumps I require, fit it to the wagon, then add the ballast. After drying and everything is solid I paint it matt black, this also weathers any exposed internal wagon sides and ends. After drying,  I then ‘Dry Brush’ gloss paint on about 50% of the raised area’s of the painted ballast.

I would also say that its not a ‘matt’ world we live in and the contrast between the wagon and the load help to enforce this.Don’t ‘over do’ the gloss, keep it subtle.

The first of my pick up freight is a six wagon rake. This is for my oval garage layout so it has no shunting capabilities, it just comes out of the fiddle yard and after a circuit goes back in. As such it has my fixed coupling method. This rake can be run in a late steam era or in an early diesel  scenario. I try to get my wagons rakes to do multiple era’s if possible and this rake could just do very early seventies.

One thing I have forgotten to mention on other wagon posts is that I remove all wheelsets on coaches and wagons and carefully paint them, I usually use Howes track colour or similar. I then carefully clean all the treads with thinners. I hate to see a nicely weathered wagon with silver or shiny wheels beneath it. It also looks odd if airbrushed and part of the wheel gets sprayed and the other half doesn’t.  I have to say I do this on even the most modern wagons as I think it helps with the overall character of the wagon or coach.

Although these wagons are basically standard Lima, I have very fond memories of this type of wagon at my local station. During the eighties and right up to the end of Speedlink they used to arrive, either in a block train or as part of the Speedlink service. If on a Speedlink they could also have UKF wagons attached.

This is my block train of twelve wagons, although I would like to put together another service with some mixed wagons.

I did notice how variable the weathering on the wagons could be, I guess this depended on just how many East Anglia to Scotland trains they had run without cleaning. I tried to reproduce this in my Lima rake. This service was a trip service from Ipswich yard, having been trunked from Whitemoor.

Only my coupling modification has been done. I may well revisit some of the dirtier wagons and redo the weathering on the suspension.