Accurascale ‘Ready to Weather’ finish explained

We had a great time at the North Down Model Railway Society exhibition with lots of people showing a great interest in the decorated samples of the HOP24. They also showed up on David Mirolo’s new layout ‘St. David’s TMD’ (which incidentally won best layout at the show!) where they looked right at home.

In the photo below you can see that the black backgrounds for the lettering and numbering is ragged. This is not down to some dodgy tampo printing, but has been individually drawn by our design team to replicate the photos we worked from in developing artwork for the wagons.

We found that with patches painted for information during the service life of these wagons was never perfectly straight, so we have replicated this on our wagons to give a ‘ready to weather’ for the modeller. This has been very popular on our Irish models and adds an extra bit of realism. This means that there is no time needed on additional preparation work before getting the airbrush and weathering powders out to personalise your wagons further. With our rake of 15 individually numbered wagons with their ratty black patches and authentic peeling and missing letters, you can concentrate on mucking them up to represent their true state in BR service.

So, if you take your shiny new wagons out of the box, and spot that the panel looks a bit sloppy, or there is half a letter missing here and there, rest assured that it is not down to bad tampo printing, but just another step in the quest of making the most realistic wagons on the market today!

Production of the first batch of HOP24 is well underway at our factory for a delivery of late May 2018. Orders are coming in thick and fast. Make sure you don’t miss out, order yours today.