Electric!

I'm sorry for the lack of updates, but fear not dear friends, I have been making progress. My work sent me on a three day course out of town. I did bring some paints and some miniatures but I mostly did undercoating and shading work. Too dark in the hotel room to paint properly. When I got back home I was a bit tired of painting US paras so I decided to do some scenery items for a change.

A transformer station. No, not the kind that turns into a giant robot.

First out is a Transformer Station from Märklin. As you might have guessed this is model railway building, depicting a small brick tower housing an electric transformer. You know, the kind that transforms the high voltage electricity from the power plant into something more suitable for households. Nowadays you see these transformer stations inside chain link fences but in the old days they built proper houses for them.

The contents of the box; three finely detailed sprues.

The tower is supplied on three sprues. As usual with model railroad kits the details are excellent. However I feel that they did cheat a bit on the colour of the sprues. Usually model railroad sprues come pre-coloured in various colours as opposed to military kits which are usually just one colour. Here we have two sprues in a brick red colur and one in a brown colour. When assembling I noticed that the isolators were on the same sprue as the non-brick sections which led me to believe this sprue originally was supposed to be white.

I then decided to paint the areas which werent bricks off-white. I used GW Dheneb Stone which was drybrushed with plain white to bring out the textures. The brick areas were painted with very dilutet Dheneb Stone which flowed between the bricks. I then scrubbed the pieces hard with a pan scourer removing all Dheneb Stone from the bricks, leaving the paint as mortar. A few bricks were highlighted with an orange pencil.

I changed the roof from brown to bluegrey

The roof was painted bluegrey and washed black and then drybrushed with light grey. I tried to give it a bit of a patchy and streaky look. Some Devlan Mud was also used to shade the door and the insulators and add streaks on the walls.

What do you call the middle of a song?

The fountain of youth?

Next up is a stone bridge and drinking fountain, both from Italeri. More on that later.