Dirty Looks

Here we see 'Before' and 'After' photographs of two of the most recent additions to our locomotive fleet - namely a Heljan Class 35 and a Bachmann Class 40.

The After photos were taken at the same location as the ones Before and, as you can see, both locos have been fairly heavily weathered and, to me, they look pretty good too; much more life-like than before.

As you may know, from previous posts, we have had most of our locos (and rolling stock) brilliantly weathered by Alex at Mikron Models in Taunton and he continued to do a few jobs for us, for a while, after the shop sadly closed in 2014 - yes we still miss that amazing shop!

However, with the need to find someone else to weather these two newly-acquired locos, we thought we would try Scott at The Weathering Works.

I had previously purchased, through e-Bay, a couple of wagons that he had weathered and was very pleased with how they looked. I then visited his website and could tell that he knew what he was doing so I sent these two locos to him on the 15 February. 

They duly returned last Saturday (1 April) and we are very pleased with the results. The turnaround time, of around 6 weeks, was a bit longer than Alex used to take and much more than the two weeks that others (like TMC) state in their advertising. 

However, he does seem to be quite a busy chap and, provided we are happy with the results (and we are), the timescales are not such an issue.

For the moment we have no more locos that need weathering but we do have several rakes of coaches that require dirtying up a bit. Therefore we may well send some of these to Scott and send some to other weathering services, such as TMC and Grimy Times, to see how they compare.

I will report back with our findings!