Green machine: GP38-3 finished…

Last week I shared the build and initial painting of the GP38-3 I’ve been working on for a few months, at the weekend I had the chance to finish this off with the airbrushed weathering…

Before I could do this though, if you look back at the post last week, you’ll see that the pin wash was applied to the gloss paint before decals so that I needed to add a touch more over these - again this time using Humbrol 86 to pick out the panel and door edges. I used a mix of Humbrol 98 and 33 to wash over the walk ways, pilots and steps, adding subtle variation to these surfaces. The same wash was used to detail the side sills giving these some tonal variation, rust streaks and dirt breaking up the otherwise solid yellow stripe. I took the chance to use matt black 33 to ‘thin’ the white on the step edges, which is a good visual trick without resorting to etched parts in these areas. 

The inside of the exhausts were also touched in with black before I took the model out to the airbrush booth in the utility room. Mixing 27004 and 133 (I’m out of 245 at present, but have some more on the way) with enamel thinners to get a nice thin mix, like skimmed milk, and applying this to the underframe, pilots and then along the roof focusing on the exhaust stacks in particular.

The result looks very much at home on Beaverbrook already, the sound of the 567 based 16 cylinder engine evocative and controllable with its Tsunami2 decoder. This project has been a relatively cheap exercise, all completed for around £200, I think it captures the character of the prototype nicely and its humble Athearn RTR underpinnings are somewhat hidden now it masquerades as a GP38-3. It stands should to shoulder with the ScaleTrains SDL39 that was nearly twice the price! Until next time, more soon…

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