How To Paint N Gauge Trains

So, you've got a 00 gauge coach there, this is an N Gauge coach, so you can see there is quite a bit of difference in the scale of the two models and that does have quite an impact on the way that you would paint the two scales. I've got here an out of the box N Gauge locomotive and that does come pre-painted, so you wouldn't start off having to paint up this model, it is already painted and some of the detailing on this is quite fine, you can see the name, it's got the number and the old British Rail logo and stuff, so there's some quite fine detailing on that. You wouldn't have to paint that, what you'd have to do there is something called weathering, which is basically taking this model from looking like a little plastic model to turning it into something which has been out in the elements making the thing look a lot more realistic.

So, I've got one here, this is a Peco old style wagon kit that was once just black plastic, and now it's been weathered to look as realistic as possible that you can do with this scale. This is an N Gauge wagon that has come out of the box, this isn't a kit, this is a bore wagon, it would basically be like that. What I'm going to do is show you how to weather up this model here.

I'm going to use these citadel color paints as they are specifically designed to paint on plastic and they do cover well. So, I'm going to take that brown which I think is quite a good rust color and I'm going to take, don't go out and spend ten pounds on a brand new brush and then do this dry brushing with it, because it will wreck the brush. You need to get an old brush which has already been pretty wrecked.

You're just going to take a little bit of this paint, basically taking the majority of the paint off the brush. You just put it onto your skin. You want to get pretty much all the paint off the brush so there is literally none on there and if you just wipe the paint across the model.

A good thing to do here is, it's better to get hardly any on there and do it a lot, than do it in one go and cover the model with paint, straight away. It's better to do this lots of times just a little bit, but what you can see is happening there is that the brush is just highlighting the areas and making what looked like that just black quite unrealistic plastic and it's slowly turning it into something that looks possibly like rusty metal, which is what they would have looked like. Obviously, depending on which era of model railway you're building.

This side of this wagon has already been detailed, but what I'm going to do is show you how to do that detailing on the other side. Now, I could talk to you for a long time about rolling stock and about how as times changed, how this was actually and how realistic you want it to be. But, I mean, you can see here, that these wagons were chalked on marks when they came in and out of sidings, so you're talking about putting writing on something which is tiny.

So, it isn't so much about actually writing on there, it's more about creating a sort of atmosphere on there. And what I'm going to do here is put some chalk writing on, obviously, I'm not writing, I'm just literally putting on a few spots of white there. This historically, I mean if you go onto the Internet and you will find hundreds of pictures of rolling stock, sometimes they're numbered, so you can see on this one, I've written a number thirteen in there.

Also, what happens over time is that these wagons are painted, but the paint flakes away, so what you need to do to sort of represent that is paint on a little bit of the wood underneath the paint, because it's actually flaked off. This is about creating an impression, not necessarily creating an accurate detail. So, you can see that these wooden boards go across ways there and then downwards on the door.

I'm just going to pick out one of these boards with a bit of brown. And take it down slowly like that. I can't even talk