No.34 Are you sitting comfortably – Is that seat free?

In between the showers there has been time to make up some of those excellent Cooper Craft GWR seats:



Those of you familiar with the kits will know that Cooper Craft provide a choice of end frames, the original Edwardian frame with entwined GWR crest and the more modern roundel or target version of the crest from the 1930s.  The notes provided with the kits suggest one ‘target’ seat to two ‘entwined crests’.  The painting instructions that are provided suggest all over brown ‘although the crests were often seen picked out in cream'.

I needed to research seat colours for the 1950/60s.  As usual my starting point was that wonderful encyclopedia ‘A Pictorial History of Great Western Architecture’ by A Vaughan.  Page 408 details the Platform Seat with Edwardian ‘monogram’ and polished pinewood backrests.  Although only a black and white illustration it is clear that the cast iron end frames are all over dark (chocolate) brown. The wood grain is clearly visible on the seat and back rest and seems to me to be reminiscent of the deep orange brown colour of a ‘pitch pine’ stair case that I stripped and polished when we bought our first house in Scotland many years ago.


But what colour were the seats in the British Rail era?  Illustrations of Charlbury (p64) attributed to British Rail and dated 1952 show the letter ‘W’ picked out in cream.  Castle Cary (p59) photographed by the Author in 1973 also shows the ‘Ws’ still picked out in cream. The picture of Savernake (p133) attributed to C Maggs from 1962 is interesting because it seems to show one seat with a ‘roundel’ picked out in cream and another seat with ‘monogram’ all over ‘brown’.




With my railway modelling I am attempting to recreate snap shots from my childhood past.  I am not tied by a particular location or time and I decided to paint ‘monogram’ frames with dark chocolate and ‘target’ frames brown with cream roundels.  For the varnished wood finished seats and back rests I mixed one part GWR engine green and six parts orange lining – simply because these colours were spare and available.




Waste not want not - with so many spare end frames left over from the kit I just had to make up some extra cardboard planks:



The planks are all 10ft (40mm) long, the two for the back rest being 1.5 and 2mm wide, whilst the seat was scribed to represent two 2.5mm planks (5mm wide in total).



I was pleasantly surprised to discover how easy it was to join the card seats with the plastic frames using MEK / Butanone.





This was the first occasion that I have mixed materials and it is a technique that I will be using again in the future.



Location: Dumfries and Galloway, UK

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