Signaling the changes...

About a year ago I bought one of the Hornby Skaledale GN style signal boxes with the initial intention of seeing how good it was and possibly repainting/detailing.

As bought

Well this week has seem my eyesight suffer in trying to make it more BR (E) in colour and tweeking some of the details, changing the chimney pot that was cracked, opening one of the windows (which are actually nice brass etches) and fitting an interior.

 


The painting turned out to be the easier bit - well the green bits - compared to building up the Wills interior kit.  This kit is all whitemetal and is possibly the worst I have seen in a long time in terms of flash and bad mouldings.  The green in place of the BR(M) red is based on the advice from this great website (http://www.stationcolours.info/) and is Tamiya flat green with a bit of white mixed in. The rest is from warhammer or Phoenix greys/browns for both the tiles and general weathering.  A final wash is still needed on the roof.

As I was going to the trouble of fitting an inside I thought it would be a good idea to light the box and decided on LEDs as grain of wheat bulbs seem to put out quite a bit of heat and I'm not sure how the resin style stuff the model is made of would survive...

I'm fairly new to LEDs and always panic about wiring them up properly but this seems to work ok - only slight concern is that the Gaugemaster contoller I have that has a 12V DC output is actually putting out nearer 16V when tried with a multimeter...

Box and partially built lever frame and interior

Still a bit of finishing to be done but one building nearly done - now just the rest of the layout to wire up, the control panel to build, all the rest of the buildings to complete and it might just look like a real railway....