Gladstone Gloss

A new item of stock which didn't manage to make it to the show at Perth was the Gladstone carriage which is still in the process of being painted and finished.

Not that it matters anyway, because the real thing would never appear at Dduallt anyway, but as the years go by we've started to bend the rules and run things - like a WHHR set - just for the fun of it.

The carriage has had a couple of coats of Humbrol gloss paint, which is applied - very carefully - by hand. There is no masking tape used to get he join between the red and the ivory, it's just a question of concentration and a steady hand.

The colour of the seats in the centre compartment has been a matter of disagreement. To my mind the fabric on the real carriage has a distinctly pink shade about it, but I was overruled, with the deciding vote coming from someone who's authority is not to be questioned.

So blue it is.

We've also gone through a lengthy process of deciding what to do about the N.W.N.G.R lettering on the side.

On the real carriage these are gold letters with partial red shading, but we've been unable to find anything equivalent to that.

We could, of course, go down the route of commissioning a bespoke set, but we've tried out some plain gold letters as a test and concluded that the red shadows probably wouldn't show up very clearly against the colour on the carriage anyway.