The LNER Encyclopedia

Hello Graeme, may I also please register interest in the bucket seats? I have several coach builds lined up that could use them

Chas

I shall endeavour to remember. Thanks for the interest.

Graeme,

I am surprised nobody has commented on your lining out of the Restaurant Car.

Please find attached my thoughts for your GN clerestory example.
John

Corrections to follow, per supplied pattern.....

No pictures to offer at this stage, but the lining is now deleted from the vertical beads above the waist at the door edges. I've also made at least some progress on the matter of translucent prints to represent the etched patterns for those windows having internal hand rails that ought to be visible through the "etched glass". Normal paper setting on my home printer produced perfectly satisfactory prints on the thinnest white tissue paper I could find in limited time. In order to get this flimsy paper to pass through the printer un-torn and un-crumpled I taped (all round their edges) squares of it onto a backing of plain paper. The prints require delicate positioning behind the glazing material, with the brass wire handrails fitted tightly behind the tissue paper, but the effect is "getting towards" the desired one.

Would tracing paper be better?

Possibly so, if it takes the ink equally well and if it isn't too grey. Had I any to hand I would probably have tried it. I had only a short time to try something between other jobs......

I simply sprayed the glazing with Testors Matt you can see the wire behind the window.

A little trickier to spray on an etched design though?

I may have occasion to visit a shop that sells tracing paper tomorrow anyway, so I'll see if I can sneak it onto a receipt for other items.....

Tracing paper goes yellow with age and exposure to sunlight.

I wonder if the same is true of tissue paper? I've had some of the glazing material itself, a plastic, yellow in the obscured windows of some Barnums I glazed over ten years ago, although it doesn't look too bad unless compared with a non-yellowed window.

I picked up some tracing paper during one of my rare enforced visits to the shops yesterday, and my impression is that when placed over a printed page the legibility of the print is about the same as with the tissue paper I've tried, but the tracing paper itself has more uniform translucency than the tissue, so that may help the line of the carriage handrails to show through. I can but give it a try when I get the time......

At last I've done some test prints on tracing paper, which rather more conveniently than tissue paper passes through my printer without the aid of a carrier layer of plain paper. When I get a bit more done I'll return with news.

Here's a puzzle. If you flick back to the previous page and compare pictures I posted on 17th July and 23rd July you'll see that on the earlier date all of the letters of the word "Restaurant" were nicely in line on the kitchen side of my 12 wheeled carriage, yet (as I've only just noticed) by the later date the "R" was well out of line, and remains so today! The old-stock HMRS transfers seem firmly attached and have not been floating around in a carelessly applied wet layer of sealing varnish as I've not yet applied any. Credible explanations may be sent to me, lightly pencilled on a £20 note.....
I'll have to put that right as well then!

As I find myself just for once not waging the summer battle against growth in the garden, not repairing and repainting a window frame, not fixing an unending series of tyre punctures on bicycles, not making / painting / hanging new garage doors, not doing awkward repairs on doors at my place of work following damage by incompetent human parasites who failed to break in, not out cycling while weather favours it and not trying to delay the progress of tin-worm on a 1970s motor car, I've done a bit more with window prints and taken some pictures of the same installed in the Restaurant Car.

It has proved very tricky to align the prints nicely with each window frame, and an attempt to produce a correctly pre-spaced set of five prints to suit the corridor side of the carriage wasted a great deal of time to no useful effect. Consequently, although I've used new prints on tracing paper for the kitchen windows, replacing previous ones on plain paper which (even with pencil shading applied) looked whiter and more solid than those I'd done on tissue paper, I have for the moment left the tissue paper prints in the corridor windows and put one of the same in the lavatory window on that same side of the carriage. This has also saved me the chore of aligning and securing new brass wire handrails behind the corridor windows. For the moment therefore I have an interesting example comparing the two types of print. What I also discovered, while playing around with various ideas, was that internal brass handrails show through the tissue paper a little better when two extra layers of tracing paper or tissue are place immediately behind them, helping to blank out the (minimal) features of the coach interior at that point. The same two extra layers of tracing paper behind the other "etched" windows also seemed to me to improved and unify the tone of those various windows.

Here's the corridor side with prints on the relatively more grainy tissue paper, and the internal brass handrails discernible (depending on the fall of light). I think the prints on the tissue paper are more or less as sharp as I wanted them to be, given that the details of the etched pattern are limited to those I thought I could discern in a few photographs. Here's the kitchen side of the vehicle, with the prints on the more uniformly translucent tracing paper, which I imagined might be better, but the prints appear to me significantly more blurred / diffuse than those on the tissue paper. I've lazily omitted the additional rain deflectors above the doorways so far, haven't I? No door handles or grab rails either. Tut tut!

Ignoring the wonky R it looks great!

G'Day Gents

Lovely looking coach, The wandering "R" I can only put down to................Climate Change !!!!!!!

manna