RNAD Crew Van: Reasonably Well Maintained

So the last stage of building the RNAD Crew Van is to paint the body. Given the rather distressed state of the loco most likely to be seen pulling it on my layout I knew I couldn't do a pristine paint job, but I also didn't want to go for a very run down look so I've attempted a kind of in between, reasonably well maintained look.

The weathering is a little more obvious in real life but essentially I've used small amounts of rust wash to help pick out the door recess, the joint with the roof, the bottoms of the window frames and along the bottom edge of the wall where it meets the underframe. I then toned down the roof with some smoke weathering powder, before using dark earth weathering powder to add some grime part way up the walls all of which was then fixed in place with a waft of satin varnish.

The final stage was to glaze the windows. This actually turned out to be much harder than I expected, as four of the windows were too large for my usual approach of using Micro Kristal Klear. Instead I had to cut some clear plastic (an off-cut from laminating something smaller than A4) to fit the window opening. I wanted the glazing to be flush to the frames rather than just placed inside the walls which meant they had to be an exact fit which took an awful lot of time, so much time that I resorted to using the Micro Kristal Klear on the smaller windows.

Other than couplings and a crew the van is finished, and yet again it was a wonderful kit to build, thanks Narrow Planet!