Let’s go Dutch…

The familiar, almost iconic grey and yellow Departmental / Engineering livery applied by British Rail to its non-revenue maintenance rolling stock, and eventually, allocated locomotives was commonly referred to as ‘Dutch’ livery…

I can’t remember why I ordered the Rapido OAA wagons in the ‘Civil Link’ livery, but their arrival coincided with a curiousity to how a Parkside / N gauge society kit assembled and its quality. I had, rather unplanned, created myself a Civil Engineers wagon fleet! It didn’t take long to thin things down, selling on a pair of the OAA to retain this one example. 

The Rudd were a rebuilt Grampus wagon, BR continued to build the GWR Grampus design after nationalisation. In the 80s the Engineering fleet was tired and largely vacuum braked, with the advent of Speedlink it was becoming harder to move vacuum brakes vehicles around the network. A number of these were modified and rebuilt with air brakes and roller bearings, the Rudd being one example. The bodies were variously completely rebuilt, ends replaced or just repaired and strengthened. 

The N Gauge Society kit is used under the Parkside Grampus as well, as such, it represents a vacuum braked wagon with grease filled axle boxes. It doesn’t take much work to carve these off, I used a slice of 1mm diameter styrene to represent the roller bearing axles boxes. The various door bangers were formed in old brass etch fret and thin brass rod as appropriate. Primed and then painted in gloss colours and finished the Society decal set, sealed with satin lacquer and weathered in my usual manner she looks up to the mark in terms of quality vs the current crop of super detailed ready to run.  

The remaining Rapido OAA has been fitted with DG couplings and weathered, making the most of the lovely tooling. Before work started I noticed the sides bowed inwards. It appears the model is moulded in several pieces - the chassis and ends as one, the floor, a cast metal part added before the sides are glued in place. By popping these off the metal sides they returned straight, so I assume the problem here isn’t malformed parts but the metal part is just a touch too small so causes distortion during the assembly process. The model has some incredible underframe detail, which of course needs weathering too - but who will ever see this! Whilst the Revolution 59 blew me away with its detail, a genuinely exciting model, the Rapido OAA is just good - perhaps the Sonic VEA and Revolution B tanks raised the game here already…

As a pair they sit well, but I don’t have a need or want for an Engineers fleet, so I’m not sure of their long term future. In the meantime they’d benefit from a spoil load, perhaps I can fabricate something removable for each, which will be good fun. Until next time, more soon…

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